Just Taking a Nap?
by Lorendiac
Summary: Of course Raven doesn't really like him or anything, but sometimes being close to Beast Boy is practically . . . tolerable. That's her story and she's sticking to it! Originally a very fluffy one‒shot; now a somewhat more serious ongoing.
1. Chapter 1: Just Taking a Nap

**Author's Note: **This short story is completely self-contained—you don't need to remember any of my other Teen Titans fanfics to understand what's happening. (Do I hear sighs of relief?)

* * *

**Just Taking a Nap?**

Raven thought she had already been _half_-awake, with her eyes still closed, for a couple of minutes before her brain really started sorting out the sensory impressions being reported in from the rest of her nervous system.

She wasn't lying down in her bed. She was sitting, more or less, on something cushioned—probably a couch—and leaning against something over on her left. Her left arm was extended behind whatever she was leaning against, pinned—not painfully—between that large object and what was presumably the back of the couch. There was some sort of smooth fabric in contact with the left side of her face.

None of that would have been very important, except that now that she paid attention—not yet daring to open her eyes—it felt and sounded as if the aforementioned large object had a pulse and was breathing. Normal body temperature, too. And although Raven's mental shields automatically went up and stayed up when she was unconscious—otherwise, she'd never get any sleep!—there was a certain masculine flavor to the psychic emanations seeping through from such close contact, so she knew that whoever was next to her, it wasn't Starfire or any other female.

That narrowed the field down to the billions of Earth's inhabitants who were . . . male. Some of whom were much likelier than others to be here in the Tower—Raven thought she was in the Tower, anyway. All sorts of awkward complications were possible, though, depending on just who she was leaning against.

_Please don't let it be Robin, please don't let it be Robin, please don't let it be Robin . . . Starfire will kill me!_

_Well no, she wouldn't _kill me_ kill me . . . but she might look and feel broken-hearted if she thought I was trying to steal her sweetie, or the other way around. That would be bad enough._

Raven had never let on that she knew exactly how Starfire had felt after catching Robin and Blackfire putting their hands on each other in the course of practicing hand-to-hand combat, but the emotions would have been impossible to miss.

But this problem wasn't likely to just go away of its own volition. At some point Raven would have to find out just how bad it was. She braced herself for the worst and opened her eyes . . . just a crack.

_Lots of . . . black and purple?_

_Beast Boy._

Raven's head was resting on her friend's shoulder and her arm was behind his back. Both of them were still wearing their full uniforms, thank goodness. And Beast Boy was definitely still asleep—there was no way he'd be able to sit still and keep quiet for more than five seconds at a stretch at a time like this.

Raven relaxed . . . a little. This wasn't nearly as bad as it _could_ have been, but it was still embarrassing. How on earth had they gotten into this ridiculous position in the first place?

Her memory was finally catching up. They'd been fighting the H.I.V.E. Five. They'd had most of the group on the ropes, and then Kyd Wykkyd had suddenly teleported in behind Beast Boy when the latter was in the form of a green coyote. Kid Wykkyd struck the coyote on the back of the neck just before Raven, in turn, had blindsided Wykkyd by dropping an already-unconscious Mammoth on him.

Then she had rushed over for a closer look at Beast Boy. A blow to the back of the neck could cripple or kill a human, much less a coyote! Hadn't happened, though—either Kyd Wykkyd had carefully used just enough force to knock the coyote out cold, or else Beast Boy had been very lucky. At any rate, he was unconscious in coyote-form. After Raven's mystic scan had confirmed there was no lasting damage requiring neurosurgery or the magical equivalent, she had picked up the coyote and carried it back to the Tower.

Just dumping a wounded teammate on his bed in his own room and then leaving him there seemed a tad callous, so Raven had gently set him down on one end of the couch in the main lounge and told the others she was volunteering to keep an eye on Beast Boy for awhile. She'd levitated a book in mid-air and read it for an hour or two. At some point she had rested a hand on the back of the coyote's furry little neck . . .

Then she must have dozed off. And Beast Boy must have unconsciously reverted back to his normal shape, once his body felt strong enough for that transformation. With the result that Raven now found herself leaning against Beast Boy's human form, which felt very different from casually touching some furry animal.

Okay, given that BB had been completely out of it at the time, she supposed she really couldn't blame this one on him. No one had forced Raven to sit down on the couch next to him and then to fall asleep herself. By the same token, nobody would stop her from getting up and walking away now that she was awake again.

On the other hand, any _prolonged_ physical contact with a guy who wasn't trying to beat her up was a rare thing in her life, for various reasons. Now she found it felt . . . kinda . . . nice.

(Even though it was _only_ Beast Boy, she hastily assured herself!)

The little grass stain could be incredibly annoying at times—but sometimes he . . . wasn't. And even when he teased her or kept unthinkingly disrupting her meditation with loud noises or otherwise did something incredibly stupid, such as sneaking into her room and then getting sucked through the magic mirror into the mental realm of Nevermore, she knew his intentions were good. Short-sighted and often self-centered, but still basically kind-hearted and affectionate. You couldn't fool an empath about that sort of thing when you had been living in the same building with her for the last couple of years . . .

(Terra, on the other hand, had sometimes grated on Raven's nerves something fierce during her brief tenure with the Titans, but not as much as would've been the case if she'd been bad to the bone. She'd been more . . . erratic and _confused_. What was Raven supposed to do, tell Robin to kick that cute little blond out on her ear because she had strange mood swings and was probably keeping secrets from the team? Robin most likely would have pointed out that more than one Titan would have to hit the road if those minor oddities became the litmus test. A certain sorceress, for instance . . .)

Nothing really bad was happening right now. Raven was still tired. It wasn't worth the trouble of getting up and walking down to her own room just so she could go right back to sleep, was it? (There was that old joke about the cluelessly over-conscientious nurse who had shaken the patient's shoulder while saying: "Wake up! It's time for your sleeping pill!")

Besides, it would be cruel to disturb Beast Boy too soon when he was still recuperating from a very tough fight. He wasn't being lazy; he had earned his rest fair and square. It wasn't like he was doing anything wrong—nor even noisy, which was a pleasant novelty. Raven didn't like it when other people woke _her_ up early without a darn good excuse, so she really ought to practice what she preached, right? She supposed she could give BB a few more minutes before she risked disturbing him as she pulled away_._

_Thirty minutes, say._

_Well . . . maybe sixty._

_Ninety, tops._

_Two hours, and that's my final offer!_

Of course, given that she didn't have a stopwatch handy and had already closed her eyes again now that she'd decided there was no emergency here, she might well drift back to sleep with Beast Boy as her pillow. In which case there was no telling just how long this absurd situation might drag on . . . what a frightening thought . . .

But if Raven were a gambling woman, she'd lay odds of five-to-one that something or someone would make a loud noise and interrupt them _long before_ another one hundred twenty minutes had passed. All part of the exciting Teen Titans lifestyle, right? So there was nothing to worry about, she assured herself as her mind began to crawl back under the metaphorical covers . . .

* * *

Robin was the stealthiest member of the team, so he'd crept through the main lounge pulling out the plugs from computers, the wall-screen TV, the DVD player, the VCR, and various other items which might make disturbing noises. He'd also undone a few telephone jacks.

Meanwhile Cyborg had been in the room that served as their IT center, deactivating this and reprogramming that to make sure that any automated alarms would not sound in that lounge until further notice. That included the communicators carried by Raven and BB. They'd been put in "sleep mode" and would not sound if any other Titans communicators were used to send out general messages.

Now they believed they had the situation under control.

"Good call, Starfire," Robin said when the three conscious Titans convened on the ground floor. "They both deserve a little quiet time. If anything comes up in the next few hours, we'll either handle it without them or just send our regrets. But either way, the noise won't disturb our friends. After all, we're only human—loosely speaking," he added hastily, since Tamaraneans weren't exactly _Homo Sapiens _and Raven's genes were only fifty percent human—but Starfire just smiled reassuringly. Clearly she'd known what he meant!

"Friend Raven probably would not believe me if I told her how _relaxed _she looked when I noticed her and Friend Beast Boy sleeping together," Starfire said thoughtfully. "Do you think I should take a digital picture to prove it to her later?"

Cyborg coughed—or made some sort of odd noise which was suppressed by a hand over his mouth.

"Starfire," Robin said hastily, "take this from me. Never, ever suggest to anyone that what's happening in the main lounge right now constitutes a case of Raven and Beast Boy 'sleeping together.' It would only hurt their feelings and confuse any outsiders who were listening."

"But are they not together on the couch?"

"Yes, they are."

"And are they not sleeping?"

"Yes, they are."

"Then are they not sleeping together?"

"_No, they are not." _

Starfire gave Robin a long-suffering look. Although she was too polite to say this in so many words, he got the message anyway. She was obviously thinking: _That makes no sense. Are you even listening to yourself?_

"Look," Robin said, painfully aware that from a standpoint of strict literal interpretation his position seemed self-contradictory, "it's one of those tricky cultural nuances that your language-learning power doesn't know how to interpret. In this country, in this language, when we say that a guy and a girl are 'sleeping together,' in _exactly_ those words, we aren't really talking about two people just happening to _lose_ _consciousness_ in the same place at the same time after an exhausting day. I admit that Raven and BB have done that much—but saying that they were 'sleeping together' would be misleading and offensive!"

"Then what _are _you talking about when you mention 'sleeping together'?" Starfire asked, not unreasonably.

Robin hesitated—and looked at Cyborg pleadingly. "A little help here?"

Cyborg ostentatiously made gestures implying he was washing his metal hands of the whole thing. "You're doing fine, buddy! Carry on!"

"Thank you so much," Robin said through gritted teeth. "It's nice to know that I have the full support of each of my friends when the going gets tough!"

* * *

Beast Boy's brain began to bestir itself. Something warm and soft was pressing against his right side. Smelled nice, too. In fact, it kinda smelled like . . . _no, it couldn't be!_

He finished waking up in a hurry and opened his eyes. He was seated on the big couch in the main lounge with _Raven_ beside him, sound asleep, head nestled against his shoulder, and one arm behind him.

Beast Boy pinched his thigh with his free hand. Ouch! All right, he was (probably) really awake. He wasted a few minutes frantically trying to figure out how this possibly could have happened before deciding it didn't really matter right now. The past was past; it was his _future_ he needed to worry about!

What was he supposed to do? If he tried to move away in a hurry, Raven's head would fall suddenly . . . and she'd wake up. If he reached over to carefully grab her head and shoulders and then shift her away from him, that would make sure Raven didn't hurt her neck when he moved away . . . but he had to figure it would still wake her up.

Either way, that would be bad!

It went without saying that if Raven woke up and found she was practically cuddling with Beast Boy, of all people . . . _he was dead meat!_ He didn't know how it had happened. He was sure he hadn't tried to make it happen. But would that really matter if Raven got horribly embarrassed and started looking for a scapegoat in the heat of the moment?

Of course, he told himself, looking frantically for a bright side, it wasn't exactly painful to have a cute girl's head resting on his shoulder and all that sort of thing. Not that he had ever _told_ Raven she looked awfully cute sometimes—he might be reckless, but he wasn't stone cold suicidal! But under other circumstances, he could have enjoyed this!

("Other circumstances" would be any which _didn't_ include a feeling of _impending doom_, as if you were sitting atop a huge bomb with the timer ticking down and no way to defuse it or get out of the blast radius before it blew you to smithereens.)

Since moving in any significant way would surely trigger an explosion, Beast Boy finally decided the best thing he could do was to go back to sleep and let someone else (Raven, for instance) figure out how to handle this . . . later.

Ideally, Raven would wake up after he was _obviously_ zonked out again.

Ideally, she wouldn't use her scary powers on a sleeping boy who wasn't actually doing anything at that moment.

Ideally, she'd then leave quietly instead of throwing a fit, working on the theory that he must've been unconscious the whole time and would _never know_ she had done anything so _vulnerable_ as dozing off and resting her head on his shoulder. (If she accidentally woke him up when she left, he'd do his best to remember to keep his eyes shut and pretend he was still out cold. It seemed polite.)

Ideally, none of the other Titans would have noticed anything—or if they had, they would somehow manage to keep their big mouths shut about it until enough time had passed that Raven might actually be able to see the _funny_ side of this strange situation. (Say, in another fifty or sixty years?)

All these far-fetched "ideallys" added up to a Very Slim Chance of getting out of this unharmed—maybe not even yelled at?—but hey, it was the best plan he could come up with under the circumstances. He couldn't exactly shout for Cyborg and Robin and Starfire to please come offer friendly advice, could he?

* * *

**Author's Note: **

How long will this awkward situation last, with one and then the other waking up, deciding not to rock the boat, and then going back to sleep? Beats me!

Now for a confession. This story was inspired by a _vague memory _of a Teen Titans fanfic I _started_ to read on this site, a few years ago, but _never_ finished. I would love to thank the author, if I could remember who he or she was!

As near as I can recall: Either the first or second chapter ended with the Titans in the T-Car, coming home to the Tower after an evening of doing something _peaceful_ together. (I think they had gone out to dinner somewhere.) Around the time Cyborg parked the car, Beast Boy realized that Raven had fallen asleep on the way back, and was now leaning against him with her eyes closed, and he was sure to wake her up if he tried to climb out of the car. He was _afraid_ to move because of the angry way he assumed she'd react if she found herself in that situation, sound asleep with her head resting against his body _as if_ she actually liked him. He frantically explained the problem to the other Titans. I believe they weren't much help; they just got out of the car quietly, not wanting to provoke Raven by disturbing her, and Robin shook Beast Boy's hand and said sympathetically: "Well, it's been nice knowing you!" (That is not an exact quote, but I think that was the general idea.)

Here's the problem: That's _as far_ as I ever got in the story, although I believe several more chapters had been posted and I _wanted_ to read them. Something in real life must have cut my Internet browsing short that day. I didn't bookmark the story before I left the computer, and a day or two later, when I tried to find that story again . . . I _couldn't remember _the title, the author, or enough other details to let me find it with a Google search. (It doesn't help that "Teen Titans" must be one of the most crowded subcategories on this site!) I'm sure the story in question wasn't anything that had been _updated _recently (this was around early 2007), so I couldn't find it again just by skimming through the last few pages of updated entries in the Teen Titans category. I'm sure it was some much older fanfic, either long since completed or long since abandoned, which I had somehow stumbled across. I've never found it again. If anyone reading this note thinks they recognize that story from my description of the situation at the end of an early chapter, then _please_ let me know what the title was, or who wrote it, or both! I can track it down from there, I'm sure!

Anyway, the other day I remembered that amusing situation. For the first time, I seriously considered writing something of my own with a similar premise. Although I went at it from a different direction. Before I knew it, I was typing out a description of what might be happening in Raven's mind if _she_ were the first to awake in such an awkward situation while Beast Boy was still _oblivious_ . . . and as you can see, the rest followed from there!


	2. Chapter 2: Under the Mistletoe

**Author's Note:** We're back by popular demand! When I wrote what is now "Chapter One" of this project, it was meant as a _fluffy_ little one-shot, written rather hastily. I classified the story as "Complete" because I had _no plans_ for any follow-up material.

But various people, on this site and another, have expressed the hope that I will continue in the same vein. In spite of myself, I found my mind toying with various ideas for further misunderstandings and near-misses in a budding romance. Then I began writing scenes to flesh out some of those ideas. (Some of those scenes are not in this chapter. One of them will probably be the last several paragraphs of the final chapter, when the time comes.)

This is the first time I've been persuaded to change a one-shot into a longer project. I decided I'd better leave the story title alone, now that it's well-established, so as not to confuse all the people who enjoyed reading the opening chapter and may be glad to see a new installment. (The number of readers who already marked this as one of their Favorites, just on the strength of Chapter One, was rather flattering!) Be warned, though, that most of the subsequent chapters will have little or nothing to do with the subject of taking naps.

By the way, I'm assuming it's now a couple of weeks after the first chapter. Some of you were probably thinking that sooner or later Raven and Beast Boy would both be awake on that couch at the same time, and would simultaneously see each other's open eyes, and then would be forced to have a _frank talk_ about certain things . . . and I _also_ thought that was a serious possibility at the time I posted that material. But remember, I originally intended it as a "complete short story" with the hypothetical aftermath left _entirely_ to each reader's imagination! If I'm going to make it a serial then I've got to prolong the suspense somehow instead of letting them have that frank talk any time soon! We'll just assume that after Chapter One ended, Raven eventually woke up again, decided she had pressed her luck as far as she dared, and quietly retreated to her room, convinced that the still-slumbering Beast Boy had _no idea_ that she had ever been snuggled up against him with her head on his shoulder as if she actually felt _very relaxed_ that way!

(None of the other residents of the Tower have rocked the boat by mentioning that they all got a good look at what was happening and thought it was awfully cute. All three of them correctly assume that the silly situation on the couch had arisen by _sheer accident_. However, none of the three ever realized that both Raven and Beast Boy woke up at different times, appraised the situation, and then went back to sleep instead of doing anything right away.)

Since Beast Boy _does_ know some of what happened that night, and has subsequently observed, to his considerable surprise, that Raven _doesn't_ seem to be harboring a grudge about it, he's beginning to work up the nerve to try to get a bit closer to Raven . . . if he can find a plausible excuse to start the ball rolling _without_ ever mentioning that he knows she was kinda snuggled up against him on the couch for awhile. (He's afraid that would embarrass her something awful—and he has a point.) That's where this second chapter opens up; he thinks he's finally found the right excuse!

* * *

**Chapter Two: Under the Mistletoe**

Beast Boy meant to be stealthy. In the form of a monkey, he clung to an overhead light fixture in the hallway with one hand, and braced himself with one foot against the upper edge of the doorframe, while his other limbs carefully held a small object flat against the ceiling and pressed the Scotch tape tightly against it; all this taking place just above the entrance to Raven's room.

Unfortunately, he also had a short attention span. By the time he was done taping up the mistletoe, he was so pleased with himself that he'd momentarily forgotten about the whole "gotta be stealthy" bit. He simply changed back to his human form while dropping to the hallway floor. The resultant thump was enough to catch the attention of Raven, who was sitting just fifteen feet away inside her room, floating in mid-air, indulging in her final meditation session of the day before crawling into bed. She extended her psychic perceptions enough to let her determine that Beast Boy was outside—now moving away—with a particularly _furtive_ tinge to his aura.

Raven waited five minutes in case he doubled back for something, then carefully teleported from one side of her closed door to the other without ever touching the knob, just in case some childish booby trap had been set up. (Something akin to the balloonful of motor oil which had splattered against Starfire's head way back when, prompting her to call Beast Boy a _clorbag varblernook_? A well-deserved epithet, Raven was sure!)

Nope, no bucket or balloon suspended overhead. But there was one new item attached to the ceiling: a sprig of the same apparently harmless plant which had killed Baldur in Norse mythology. And Christmas was just a few days away.

It didn't take a genius to size up the situation. (Raven _was_ a genius, but in this case it wouldn't have mattered if she weren't.) The old "kissing under the mistletoe" routine. Obviously the grass stain would be lurking in the hallway around breakfast time tomorrow, just waiting for Raven to poke her head out the door so he could pounce!

This was corny, immature, opportunistic, and generally just what you'd expect from Beast Boy.

(It was also . . . just a tiny bit . . . flattering . . . to be his chosen target. At least, if she was the _only_ girl he was planning to ambush that way this holiday season. If it turned out he was planning to treat Raven as just one of many names on a scorecard for a whole series of Mistletoe Ambushes this week, then was he ever going to regret it!)

On the other hand, the strip of Scotch tape he had used to fasten it to the ceiling didn't look very sturdy. It would be another seven or eight hours before Beast Boy would be expecting her to emerge for breakfast. If someone didn't do something, the steady tug of gravity combined with the normal vibrations of the hallway—doors opening and closing, for instance, and Cyborg tromping through—might easily shake that sprig loose before Beast Boy got any mileage out of it.

This annoyed Raven. If you were going to set an ambush, you could at least take the trouble to do a proper job! Just imagine how awkward it would be if Beast Boy assumed the mistletoe was still overhead where he had left it, and caught her by surprise with a quick kiss . . . and then hastily defended himself by pointing upward to where his justification ought to be dangling . . . and then they both saw it _wasn't_.

At that point, as a matter of pride, Raven naturally would have to _punish_ him for stealing a kiss _without_ having so much as a thin veneer of an excuse rooted in a ridiculous holiday tradition. Beast Boy's resultant whimpers would probably ruin everyone's appetite for the rest of the day. Couldn't have that!

She levitated up towards the ceiling and peered at the taped mistletoe more carefully. _Something_ had to be done. Duct tape? Superglue? She'd better head down to the garage and see what was currently in stock for hasty repair work.

* * *

A few hours after sunrise, Cyborg still wondered how he had gotten it so wrong in guessing what would happen.

Since Cyborg's largely-mechanical body didn't need as much sleep as regular flesh-and-blood metabolisms, he had been up very early that morning, prowling the halls of the Tower, and had noticed the sprig of mistletoe attached to the ceiling just outside Raven's door. He knew _he_ hadn't put it there. _Robin_ didn't behave that way—and Raven wouldn't be the likely target anyway. No guests were staying in the Tower this week. That narrowed the field to _one_ likely suspect!

Cyborg had a good idea of when Raven usually came out to the kitchen to scrounge up some breakfast. About an hour before that time, he awoke Robin and Starfire and quietly briefed them on the mistletoe situation.

The three friends had rapidly agreed on a few things.

First, nobody would warn Raven about this. It wasn't like Beast Boy was some psychotic stalker, after all. (Besides, Raven could take care of herself. If Beast Boy got way too fresh, she might teach him a valuable lesson in manners.)

Second, none of them would be anywhere nearby when Raven emerged from her room. After all, it was possible that the presence of a witness would cause Raven to react more harshly than she would if she thought an encounter under the mistletoe could be kept a purely _private_ matter. (But Cyborg would set up a miniature spycam to record the event for posterity.)

Third and most importantly, they needed to get some bets down on what would actually happen when Beast Boy sprang his ambush! Each of the three would make a prediction. Whoever came closest to the truth was the winner. He or she would be excused from any housekeeping chores outside of his or her own room for the next two weeks; the losers would do that person's normal share for one week apiece.

Robin had been betting that Raven would give Beast Boy a serious tongue-lashing, but wouldn't hurt him beyond that.

Cyborg had been betting on something really painful for Beast Boy—maybe a slap to the face, maybe something more serious. Such as the way she'd once handled Doctor Light, leaving him a whimpering nervous wreck.

Starfire had been betting they were both wrong and Raven would take it much better than they thought. She might not look happy about it (par for the course with Raven), but she wouldn't scream or lash out at Beast Boy with her hands or her powers.

Neither Beast Boy nor Raven had mentioned whatever had happened—if anything had?—after Raven appeared in the main lounge and started nibbling on something for breakfast.

Neither of them had mentioned it during the subsequent training session coached by Robin, either.

Later that morning, when the three conspirators were able to steal off for a few minutes without it looking suspicious, Cyborg had played back the recording of that crucial minute.

The reality was surprisingly anticlimactic. Beast Boy, previously lurking as a spider on the wall near the door, had suddenly morphed into his usual self and pressed his lips against Raven's right cheek, then hastily jumped away; saying very fast, "Holiday Greetings! Mistletoe! Look! My 'Get Out of Jail Free' card! You aren't allowed to kill me!" While pointing frantically at the green thing a few feet above the sorceress's head.

Raven had stared at him, then upward, and then said, "If I remember Monopoly right, you only get to use that sort of card _once_ before you lose it." The sprig had been suddenly surrounded by black energy—and when the blackness dissipated, the mistletoe wasn't there anymore. Just unblemished ceiling. Apparently feeling that she had made her point, Raven had turned away and calmly moved off toward breakfast at her normal pace.

Behind her, Beast Boy had wiped his brow, then grinned. Possibly congratulating himself on being such a sly dog and coming through unscathed?

So Starfire won, hands down. Robin and Cyborg had been sure she was underestimating the problem because of the general lack of emotional impact associated with "kissing" in Tamaranean culture. But maybe she had understood the strength of Raven's carefully cultivated _stoicism_ better than they did? Or maybe the violet-haired girl had been touched just a little bit by the holiday spirit of peace and tolerance and didn't want to get blood on the floor, figuratively or literally?

(The far-fetched idea of Raven actually _enjoying_ a smack on the cheek from Beast Boy was, of course, too laughable to be seriously considered by either of his male teammates! Starfire seemed to agree with that assessment . . . or at least she never _said_ she didn't.)

* * *

After the training session Raven had retreated to her room, which surprised no one. The other Titans might have been startled by the current trend of her thoughts, however.

Two things surprised Raven about the Mistletoe Ambush, in hindsight. One was that Beast Boy had only kissed her on the cheek. She'd thought the impudent little joker would have more _courage_ than that, if he had the nerve to ambush her in the first place. It was disappointing to realize that a fellow Titan was lacking in valor!

The stranger and larger concern was that brittle objects in the vicinity—such as windows and light bulbs—had _not_ broken during the moment those lips were touching her face. Nothing had even rattled around, near as she could tell! That non-event had neatly scuttled the excuse she'd been _planning_ to use for only letting Beast Boy get away with this once—as an experiment— before emphatically warning him that it was far too rough on the Tower's equipment for him to try that stunt more than once a year as a holiday gesture. Now she had to rethink her tactics.

Why _hadn't_ anything broken?

In some ways, the simplest explanation could be that getting a brief kiss from an immature practical joker such as Beast Boy just didn't carry enough of an emotional charge to activate the involuntary use of her powers. Because she just didn't take him all that seriously in the first place? And/or because she'd _known_ it was coming and had been psychologically braced for it? And/or because she knew there was really nothing romantic about it?

An impartial observer, only knowing what had been said and done as viewed from the outside, probably would have settled for that reasoning. Raven, however, was dubious. She was fairly certain her emotional reaction at the time had qualified as "pretty darn strong," although she had apparently done a decent job of keeping her composure so that Beast Boy couldn't tell just what she really thought of the odd experience.

Another possibility was that she had reached the point where even that sort of thing, although emotionally loaded, just plain couldn't overload her conditioned self-restraint after all these years of practice. But it might have been a very near thing?

After all, Raven's emotion-linked powers had never made her _utterly_ untouchable. As a rule, nothing bad happened when Starfire hugged her or Cyborg carried her off a battlefield after she'd been wounded. She _had_ felt considerably more exci—um, make that more _perturbed_—by that so-called "kiss" than she would have been if the grass stain had just touched her arm to get her attention. But apparently her years of training had been adequate to the task of keeping her powers in check. Presumably her emotions would have been_ far more_ stimulated if it had been a "real" kiss with mouth-to-mouth contact, such as you saw in the movies?

This second theory seemed more plausible. As it now stood: Raven, totally lacking practical experience in that area, could only _speculate_ about whether or not full-fledged kissing would shake her equilibrium as hard as it seemed to hit many other girls. If so, the side effects could be scary.

Arranging a proper test of that hypothesis would be very difficult, though. What was she supposed to do, ask Beast Boy to kiss her all over again, firmly on the lips this time, _strictly_ in the name of scientific experimentation? Boys were frequently irrational about that sort of thing—and Beast Boy's rationality was nothing spectacular at the _best_ of times. He'd probably get entirely the _wrong_ idea and think she was just inventing some half-baked excuse to smooch with him! (Ridiculous notion!)

On the other hand . . . since she _hadn't_ been able to deliver the planned lecture about kissing her being far too rough on the Tower's infrastructure, it was _conceivable_ that he was planning to stage a repeat of this mistletoe ambush all over again tomorrow, in some different place where she (presumably) wouldn't be expecting it.

_Hmm. If I can sense him coming in the nick of time and just "accidentally" turn my head the right way at the _last_ possible moment, then lip contact might be established by "sheer coincidence" . . . and then the results might be very interesting to observe._

_Good grief, the things I am prepared to do in the name of research! _

_But I've got to find out sooner or later, don't I? Can't just go through the rest of my life paralyzed with fear that if I ever do make lip contact with a guy, it _might_ bring the roof down on our heads! If that's the simple truth, then let's find out as soon as possible so I can come to grips with it—or figure out how to overcome it, given more time—instead of just biting my nails wondering! _

Raven abruptly became aware that her pulse had accelerated for no good reason while she paced back and forth in her room, chewing on the situation. Apparently this topic was getting more _stressful_ than she had thought. Obviously it was time to consciously calm her body and start meditating on this problem in an orderly way until she had everything in its proper perspective.

She settled into lotus position, hovering three feet above the floor, closed her eyes, regulated her breathing, and started some heavy-duty meditating.

After a half-hour of meditating about what had actually happened inside her, and what had totally failed to happen in the surrounding environment, during and immediately after that quick "kiss" from Beast Boy, she decided it was time to put that behind her for the time being and move on to a fresh topic.

So she meditated for another half-hour about how nice it had felt—for reasons she couldn't quite define—to be leaning against him on the couch a few weeks ago, for an extended period, without his even knowing it.

Then she meditated for a half-hour about the possible ramifications of letting him kiss her on the lips tomorrow—_if_ he tried the mistletoe stunt again—in order to establish exactly how much of that sort of thing her subconscious was currently willing to tolerate _before_ it went ballistic.

Then she meditated about how this was getting silly and it really wasn't necessary to keep thinking about Beast Boy when she was meditating.

She had meant to give that last topic a full hour of its own so she could consider the matter from every possible angle, but she was only about twenty-five minutes into that stage when her thoughts were disrupted by the blare of a Red Alert sounding throughout the Tower. Raven made a mental note to pick up where she had left off when she started her next meditation session, then rushed to the main lounge to find out which villain was running amok this time around!

* * *

**Author's Note:** I want to clarify my feelings about schemes such as Beast Boy's in real life. After reading this chapter, you may well be wondering!

To tell the truth, I have _never_ been a big believer in the idea that positioning a sprig of mistletoe overhead during the holiday season actually makes it "all right" for a guy to surprise someone else and plant a kiss on her if they aren't already on such good terms that he could reasonably expect her to _appreciate_ that sudden kiss, with or without the flimsy excuse of mistletoe.

But then I'm not a big believer in the idea that demon lords are able to impregnate human women and produce superpowered half-breed offspring, either! I am religious, but I don't believe that particular scenario is even remotely possible in the real world. Yet I implicitly embrace that assumption (and many others) whenever I write a story about the Teen Titans.

If I can accept that whopper as a plot device, I suppose I can also accept the smaller assumption that a Mistletoe Ambush of someone who has never encouraged you to kiss her is tolerable behavior in the world of the animated series, no matter how _rude_ I might consider it to be in the _real_ world. It helps that I placated my conscience by making it clear to the reader that in this particular case the girl in question _knew_ what was coming and didn't exactly strive to avoid it, as she _easily_ could have done!


	3. Chapter 3: Snake in the Grass

**Chapter Three: Snake in the Grass**

The alarm had come from the Jump City Museum of Antiquities. Someone had recognized Puppet King among the invaders and called it in. He was being assisted by masked figures who were either ordinary henchmen in good body armor or else life-size puppets; no one was quite sure. The museum's security guards had fired a few bullets at the invaders without eliciting so much as a yelp of pain in response. That was when they, along with the first police officers to arrive, had decided to fall back and just try to secure a perimeter outside the museum while they waited for the Titans to arrive and handle this weirdness.

_Probably a good call_, Beast Boy reflected.

Robin had decided to divide the team until they had a better handle on the shape and size of the problem. He would take Starfire and Cyborg and enter the museum's west wing. Raven and Beast Boy would sweep through the east wing. They'd stay in touch via communicators.

Now Raven and Beast Boy moved down a hallway, Raven checking the rooms on the left, Beast Boy those on the right. He was the first to spot anyone else, when he passed under an archway into a room full of Egyptian artifacts. Standing across the room from him, examining a collection of scarabs, was a statuesque woman with wavy blond hair cascading down to her hips. As for her wardrobe . . . well, she looked as if she'd been interrupted in the middle of getting dressed.

She was wearing what looked like a metal bra, covering most of her breasts. Aside from a few simple bracelets on each arm and a headpiece shaped like a coiled snake, holding her hair back so that it spilled down behind her, the metal bra was about _all_ this woman wore above the waist. The waist itself was girded by a belt of shiny metal ovals, which seemed to be holding up a gauzy pink skirt that nearly brushed the floor, but it didn't conceal much; you could get a good idea of what her legs looked like.

Beast Boy estimated the blond's measurements at 36-24-36, standing about five foot nine, age somewhere in her twenties . . . not that he really cared or anything; those numbers just happened to pop into his head after the first admiring glance.

"All right, lady!" he snapped, bound and determined to show he could take the job seriously even when confronted by such a total babe. "What do you know about the gang that's invaded the museum? And if you're not with them, why are you wandering around in here, dressed like _that_, after visiting hours?"

The blond woman turned toward him and languidly raised her empty hands above her head as if to emphasize her lack of dangerous weaponry. (Beast Boy had to admit it was darned hard to figure out where she could be concealing a handgun, fr'instance.) "You don't like my apparel?" she asked. "What'sss wrong with it?"

He wasn't touching that one with a ten-foot pole. "It's not a question of what I like—it's a question of why you're wearing it _here and now_!"

"I jussst love old Egyptian thingsss," she explained. "I mussst have lossst track of the time." She was stepping slowly toward him now, her body undulating a little, but her eyes were staying locked onto his . . . were those eyes oddly shaped, or was it just an illusion created by the dark makeup around them and the odd way each of her eyebrows seemed to twist upward in the middle . . . she was coming closer and closer . . . . his eyes couldn't seem to shift away from hers, but he heard her saying, "Fassscinating. I sssee you are more in touch with your reptilian ssside than mossst men. Perhapsss that makesss you more sssusssceptible to my influenssse . . ."

* * *

Raven, having heard voices while she was across the hall, peered in through an archway and saw a glamorous, golden-haired, blatantly feminine stranger moving closer and closer, in a hip-swaying sort of way, to Beast Boy. The fact that the woman was dressed like a go-go dancer didn't do a thing for Raven . . . but might explain why her green teammate was being uncharacteristically _still_ and _quiet_.

"Hold it! Who are you?" Raven demanded.

The blond woman's head snapped around with a displeased expression on her face—then she regained control remarkably fast and smiled a sweet smile. "Jussst a friend of your charming teammate."

The woman's hissing was annoying, but perhaps she couldn't help it. Raven wanted to hear Beast Boy himself vouch for her good character, though. "Beast Boy? Is this lady actually an old friend of yours?"

The woman looked back at Beast Boy as he spoke carefully. "Yes . . . she is my friend. It's all right . . . you can leave us . . . alone."

The blond woman smirked at that show of support.

Beast Boy's voice was a slow monotone; not at all the way he would normally express himself. In fact, he sounded depressingly like Raven herself might sound when telling him to go away and stop pestering her! But she didn't think he was trying to mimic her as a joke. He hadn't even bothered to turn his head to face Raven when he spoke; it seemed he only had eyes for the blond. And since when did he so suddenly _lose interest_ in an ongoing mission, such as hunting down and fighting Puppet King and his minions?

Of course Beast Boy wasn't usually face-to-face with such a sensational distraction. At his age, those masculine hormones must really be running wild in his bloodstream, and most of the women the Titans met in their line of work didn't try so hard to pander to the likely tastes of teenage boys, so Raven didn't have much of a baseline to use in gauging whether or not it was "normal" for BB, upon encountering such a woman and _perhaps_ really recognizing her from elsewhere, to be standing there like a lump on a log, just staring at the woman and oblivious to all else.

Was it possible that the blond really wasn't using anything except her looks and personality to make Beast Boy seem almost mesmerized? In which case Raven would look a total fool if she tried to _forcibly_ separate the two of them when Beast Boy wasn't in any danger of bodily harm . . . on the other hand, right now she wasn't inclined to assume nothing bad could possibly happen if she turned her back on the pair of them for the next ten minutes . . .

Raven took another hard look at the stranger. What did this hussy really have going for her, aside from that eye-catching mass of blond hair and those sizeable breasts and all that smooth, soft, _normal_-looking skin and those barely-veiled legs and those pouting lips and those exotically shaped eyebrows and the classical beauty of her facial features and that shameless way of flaunting her obviously flawless body and all those other characteristics which must add up to make the package deal a heck of a lot more alluring to most red-blooded American boys than a half-demon freak such as _Raven_ could ever dream of being, what with her unhealthy-looking complexion and the way things broke when she started to lose her cool and the even scarier habit of having her eyes glow like burning coals in the darkness whenever she _really_ lost her temper, not to mention all the miscellaneous psychological baggage which made it so hard for her to so much as show any appreciation on the occasions when some nice guy actually made a sincere effort to _try_ to get to know her better?

(Yes, Raven _realized_ her train of thought had veered away from the original point, somewhere along the line, but she didn't have time to worry about that just now.)

While she had been studying the blond bombshell, the older woman had been studying her right back, not looking particularly impressed by the results of the survey, and now their eyes met again as the woman said, "Sssatisssfied? You heard your friend. Now run along, child! We have persssonal busssinesss to conduct and you can sssee I'm not one of thossse dangerousss ruffiansss you are ssseeking . . . _can't you_?"

Raven's head jerked in shock as a psychic thrust slammed into her like a punch to the chin from a heavyweight boxer.

This was when years of training made the difference. Azarathian conditioning automatically raised Raven's mental shields to full strength while her conscious mind was still reeling for a moment—but then she recovered her focus, and felt confident that she could hold out indefinitely against _that woman's_ preternaturally hypnotic gaze, now that the problem was identified!

It had been a near thing, though—if the first few seconds of mental contact had gone a little differently, Raven would already be meekly turning away and marching down the hall, ready to assure the other Titans (when she found them) that Beast Boy was in good hands!

Instead she was just _annoyed_. Raven stepped forward, out of the archway, saying: "Nice try, but I think you've shot your wad now. I'm going to tie your hands and I'm going to blindfold you, and if you want to put up a fight then I'll—"

That was when Beast Boy suddenly changed into a ram, lowered his head, and charged forward, knocking the blond woman down. She shouted—more in frustration than pain, it seemed—and then something fell from overhead and thudded against Raven's raised hood. Not heavy enough to be painful, but distracting.

If Raven hadn't already been pumped on adrenaline, she might not have reacted quickly enough. As was, she instantly (and magically) shoved backwards her hooded cape and anything clinging to it, getting the unseen threat _far away_ from her body. A few seconds later she could spare the time to refocus on the enemy—and then she froze for an instant.

The woman was now a snake-woman . . . a Lamia, maybe? Everything below the waist had become a gigantic serpent's tail when Raven wasn't looking, mostly green with a pink underbelly, and the woman appeared to have just bitten the green ram's neck. It screamed and morphed back into Beast Boy's human form as the snake-woman sneered at Raven, showing the snake-like forked tongue she now possessed (several inches long?) and the protruding fangs which likewise hadn't been there a minute ago.

"Ssstruggle with me or sssave your friend, little witch? The bite of Lady Viper isss deadly if untreated!"

Raven had once read of a case where a bunch of teenagers were out in the desert and one of them got bit by a rattlesnake. Angered by the attack, the victim's friends spent the next several minutes chasing and killing the serpent. _Then_ they put the poisoned boy in a car and drove him to a hospital for treatment—but he died there. The time wasted on revenge had made a fatal difference.

She didn't care to repeat that mistake in setting priorities. And Beast Boy was already on the floor, groaning, apparently too weak to move . . .

"Beat it," Raven growled. She wanted to deliver a dramatic threat about what would happen the next time they met, but there just wasn't time. She rushed over to Beast Boy and looked at the wound, but kept herself turned to face in Lady Viper's direction so she'd notice if that bimbo came any closer . . .

Showing remarkable prudence, Lady Viper _didn't_ say anything further to rub Raven's nose in this defeat. Instead she slithered away through another archway off to the left, and after a moment one could hear the sound of running feet, suggesting the villainess had shifted back to her fully human form.

Raven noticed this, but couldn't afford to worry about it any further. They didn't have Girl Scouts in Azarath, but she still knew some basic first aid. Even for a sorceress, it could be vitally important to know the conventional ways to _buy time_ for a critical patient before you started trying to apply magic to the problem. With a venomous snakebite, a quickly-applied tourniquet was sometimes desireable. Unfortunately that wasn't practical when the wound was on the _neck_. Despite anything she might have said on other occasions, Raven did believe that cutting off the flow of blood to Beast Boy's brain would have a deleterious effect on his IQ. So skip that step and move on to trying to _drain_ some of the poison before it could all be dispersed through the bloodstream.

(She wasn't thinking all this in complete sentences; she was just _reacting_ according to trained reflex.)

You were supposed to cut an X near the wound—which, she noted, was already started to swell.

Raven didn't carry any blades in her costume. But with one thought she shattered a light bulb and then seized the longest resulting shard of glass with black force so it wouldn't slice up her fingers. A couple of careful slashes into Beast Boy's flesh, and then she pressed her mouth over the wounded area and started sucking. Nasty flavor—the blood on her tongue was definitely _tainted_. Which was good news, in a perverse sort of way; it meant a fair amount of venom was still lingering in the area of the bite, instead of having been pumped through the circulatory system already.

She spat to one side and repeated the process. (Beast Boy was already unconscious at this point.)

Again.

Again.

The blood oozing from BB's neck tasted reasonably normal now—not that Raven had ever tasted his blood before, but she'd tasted her own, and this was much the same. She decided not to keep sucking this time—medieval physicians might've thought draining off more blood was a good remedy for lots of ailments, but this wasn't the Middle Ages. In a moment she'd need to start casting spells—then she glanced up and saw Robin standing in the archway off to her right, surveying the room. How long had he been there?

In a flash, Raven realized what this must look like. A teenage boy lying on his back on the floor; a teenage girl kneeling beside him, with her mouth evidently pressed against his neck . . . and from that angle, Robin couldn't possibly have seen the marks on BB's neck to clue him in! She raised her head, glared ferociously at the team leader, and snapped, "It's not what it seems!"

Robin cocked his head. "Really! You mean you _haven't_ been sucking out some sort of toxin from a fresh wound on the theory that your magic can then do a faster, better job of countering whatever amount is left in Beast Boy's system?"

She blinked. "Okay . . . so maybe it's _exactly_ what it seems to be! At least when the person doing the looking is the protégé of the World's Greatest Detective." As she spoke, she was putting her hands gently around Beast Boy's neck and concentrating on a healing spell. After several seconds, she added, "Most people would have assumed Beast Boy and I were . . . necking."

"Well, maybe, if they didn't actually know you," Robin said judiciously. "But of course _I_ realized you'd never put your lips against Beast Boy's skin for . . . frivolous . . . reasons. It would take a life-and-death emergency to make you even _consider_ it!"

Something deep inside Raven's mind objected to that blithe assumption. Robin had certainly reached the _correct_ conclusion when diagnosing the situation, yet there was something . . . irritating . . . about _how_ he had gotten there in the first place.

"He was bitten. Did you see a blond woman, metal bra, might be wearing a pink skirt or might look half-snake where her legs should be—"

"No," Robin said. "We were kinda busy with a bunch of life-size puppets until a couple of minutes ago. That's all taken care of now. But your description sounds like Lady Viper."

"Yes, that's the name she used! You know her?"

"Never met her in my life. Batgirl got bitten by her once in Gotham. _Barely_ survived. Later, using a venom sample, a lab was able to produce an antidote. I'll make a couple of calls and see if we can get some of that flown out here—or maybe the formula is something a Jump City hospital lab could whip up in a jiffy once they saw it?"

"Any unusual effects I need to know about?"

"Well, Batgirl managed to extract some of the venom from her own neck, which _may_ have made a difference, but she still collapsed for awhile. After she woke up, and before anyone found an antidote, she discovered she could turn the bottom half of her body into a gigantic snake's tail, just like Lady Viper." Robin eyed his unconscious friend dubiously. "Of course, in BB's case, I don't see that being much of a change."

Raven didn't argue the point. "By the way, _something_ landed on my cloak, so I . . . threw it away. Can you check it out? Might still be dangerous."

Robin disappeared for a minute. When he came back, just as Raven was finishing up a second healing spell for luck, he said, "Must've been the small coral snake you felt land. I killed it."

"Coral snake?

"Yes. Lady Viper has complete control over snakes in general. Where were you when it attacked?"

"I'd just come through that archway."

Robin studied the terrain. "It must've been resting on a ledge overhead, lurking in ambush. When Lady Viper sent the command, it dropped over the edge. Your hood was up?"

"Yes."

"That's it, then. The poor creature had orders to bite whatever it fell on, but all it did was snag its fangs in the fabric. Then you threw it across the hallway and stunned it, I think. If you'd been bare-headed, you'd need some emergency treatment yourself!"

* * *

**Author's Note:** If you never heard of Lady Viper before—which you probably haven't—don't worry; you haven't been missing much! She's a comic book villain—but an _incredibly obscure_ one. Not an old Titans foe; she simply fought the original Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) way back in **1982** and has _never_ been heard from since. (I merely assume that old clash also happened in the timeline of the _Teen Titans_ animated series.) Lady Viper's powers included: 1) superb mental control of snakes, 2) some ability to use a hypnotic stare on human beings as well (although I don't _think_ the effects lasted long), 3) the magical ability to change into a giant snake from the waist down, and 4) a poisonous bite when she was in her half-snake form and had venomous fangs in her mouth. However, her personality never amounted to much of interest (in my opinion).

I had never planned to use her in anything. It happened almost by accident. When I posted the previous chapter, I hadn't made up my mind which villain the Teen Titans would be confronting in Chapter 3, but I intended to use someone from the animated series.

But then I started thinking about embarrassing situations I could work into the plot . . . and I thought it would be funny to have a scene with Raven sucking at Beast Boy's neck and terribly afraid that people would get the wrong idea. That meant something or someone with a venomous bite had to attack Beast Boy first. A sentient supervillain would be more interesting than just having BB encounter an irritated rattlesnake, for instance. So I asked myself: "Okay, which DC villains are likely to attack a superhero _that_ way, instead of using super-strength or energy blasts or whatever?" The first who sprang to mind was Lady Viper.

Even so, I hesitated over whether it was worth the trouble to refresh my memory of her characteristics and then use her . . . but _then_ I remembered the way Lady Viper used to dress (it goes back to before she got her powers, when she was working in a carnival sideshow, letting snakes slither all over her), and I suddenly realized I might get some mileage out of Beast Boy's reaction to that provocative outfit, and Raven's reaction to _his_ reaction, and so forth. I decided Raven is a tad self-conscious about her own failure to look like a walking, talking Barbie doll, whereas Lady Viper's human form comes much closer to achieving that "ideal" . . .

* * *

**P.S.** Today—after I was almost ready to post this chapter, including the notes about Lady Viper—it belatedly occurred to me to check what Wikipedia says about recommended treatment for a patient who's just been bitten by a venomous snake. In writing this chapter, I'd been working from memory—back in the 1980s I was a Boy Scout studying for my First Aid merit badge.

Apparently modern medicine has since decided the following things are **not** worth the trouble of doing, and may even do more harm than good: 1) applying a tourniquet to isolate the bitten area, 2) making a new incision on or near the wound, 3) sucking out any lingering venom. In other words, if a friend or relative of yours gets bitten by a rattlesnake tomorrow morning, you probably _shouldn't_ follow Raven's example! (If you want to know what _is_ recommended, try searching on Wikipedia for "snakebite.")

That came as a shock. I had no intention of rewriting the entire chapter, however—so now I'm working on the hastily-devised theory that Raven, growing up in a separate dimensional reality, was taught basic first aid from printed materials _decades old_, which still recommended those methods. Robin presumably has more up-to-date training, but came in _too late_ to stop her from cutting and sucking at Beast Boy's neck, and decided it wasn't a great idea to waste time, right then and there, arguing about the pros and cons of what she had _already done_. Especially since he had the considerable comfort of knowing that this was a special case. It was a cinch that Raven would also cast healing spells on BB in just a moment, and that would almost certainly _prevent_ the incisions on his neck from getting infected. Later, when things are much calmer, Robin will find a way to tell her that recommended emergency first aid methods have _changed_ when she wasn't looking!


	4. Chapter 4: She Did What?

**Chapter Four: She Did What?**

_"What?_ You mean I sucked on Beast Boy's neck for _nothing?"_

Unnoticed by either of his friends in the room, Beast Boy's eyelids twitched.

"Quiet, quiet!" Robin said softly, making shushing gestures. "We don't want to disturb him!"

Beast Boy opened his eyes and instantly knew he was in a hospital bed. He'd spent way too much time in such places, years ago, first because of an incredibly rare disease, and second because of the surprising side effects of the highly experimental cure. (Turning green all over, from head to toe, tends to make doctors and nurses think there is something terribly _wrong_!)

Two of his friends—Raven and Robin, as he'd thought—were standing near the foot of the bed, staring at each other.

If Beast Boy had taken a few seconds to think this over, he _might_ have closed his eyes again and kept his mouth shut a while longer. But he was still groggy, and the risks didn't occur to him until it was a trifle too late. He simply reacted to the strange words which had dragged him back into the land of consciousness. "Guys?" he heard himself say hoarsely. "What's this about . . . my neck?"

Two heads snapped around toward him. Naturally he focused his eyes on the prettier one.

Raven's face showed an amazing sequence of shock, relief, anger, and finally embarrassment as some color rose to her cheeks. Beast Boy wished he had a camcorder running—it wasn't every day you saw so many of her emotions rising to the surface so fast! Besides, she looked _exceptionally_ cute when she blushed, although in all the time he'd known her, he'd only had the chance to see it happen a couple of times before. Be nice to have a picture as a memento!

Meanwhile Beast Boy's question was still hanging heavily in the air, waiting to be addressed. Around the time Raven pulled up her hood to shadow her blushing face and then quickly turned away from Beast Boy, Robin finally took it upon himself to grab the conversational ball. "While Cyborg and Starfire and I were dealing with Puppet King and his minions, you met Lady Viper. Do you remember that part?"

Beast Boy thought back. "That's the blond woman who . . . uh, wasn't wearing much? She stared at me and then I . . . couldn't . . . look away. She kept talking to me . . . and then I heard her talking to Raven . . ."

"Magical hypnotic gaze," Robin said reassuringly. "You couldn't help yourself."

"Yeah . . . but finally it started wearing off . . . felt like recovering from a session . . . in front of Mad Mod's hypno-screens . . ."

"Probably she lost control of you when she was focused on trying to give Raven the same treatment," Robin speculated.

"Okay . . . so I suddenly could move again, and I knew she'd done something nasty to me . . . so I morphed and charged forward to knock her down before she could zap me again. Then something . . . weird . . . happened . . . and there was pain in my neck . . . and I woke up here."

Raven was still and quiet. Robin cleared his throat . . . twice . . . and then got down to brass tacks. "Okay, I'll fill in the blanks for you. Turned out you weren't the only shapeshifter in the room. Lady Viper can change the lower half of her body into a giant snake's tail. When she does, she also grows poison fangs and a long, snaky tongue in her mouth. She must've made the change in the blink of an eye! Then she bit your neck and then skedaddled while Raven was giving you . . . uh, emergency first aid, followed by a healing spell."

"And what was the . . . yelling about . . . when I woke up?"

Robin ran a gloved hand through his spiky hair and then said, "I was just telling Raven that recommended first aid for venomous snakebites has changed over the last several years. The printed training materials in Azarath must be behind the times. Cutting the bitten area open and putting a human mouth against it just creates that many more opportunities for nasty germs from the helper's saliva to get into the blood and cause infection, and by the time one starts sucking out the venom, the effort usually extracts _so little_ of the original dose of toxin that it probably isn't worth the trouble. Also, having venom-tainted blood in one's mouth can cause the helper to get dangerously ill!"

Beast Boy paused to work out the ramifications of Robin's carefully _impersonal_ summary of certain treatment methods. "So what you're saying is . . . she was . . . sucking . . . on . . . my . . . neck?"

"Yes, with the very best of intentions in a sudden life-and-death situation," Robin explained patiently. "I'm not sure how much good it did, but I'm _not_ ready to swear it did absolutely none."

"She was . . . sucking . . . on . . . my . . . neck."

"Yes, I think we've established that. These things happen. Now, moving away from the past to the future, the doctor said that if you woke up soon, he'd just want to check you over one more time and then he'd probably give us the go-ahead to take you home to finish convalescing—"

Beast Boy repeated, more strongly: "She was _sucking_ on my _neck_!"

He thought Raven flinched, which hadn't been his intention. She had spent the last couple of minutes turned away so Beast Boy couldn't see so much as a square inch of her face. That didn't change as she said in her usual monotone, "I think he's still a touch delirious, Robin. Sounds like a broken record. Can't we hit a reset button or something? You know, shut him down overnight and then come back and try all over again in the morning?"

"No!" Robin said sternly. "After waiting all this time for him to wake up, we are _not_ going to turn around and give him a massive dose of sedative to knock him out all over again just for your personal convenience!"

Raven grumbled something in a language Beast Boy couldn't even name, and he didn't think Robin understood it either—but the general sentiment was clear.

"Look," Robin said, "you've done all you can for BB, and probably saved his life with the spells if not with the earlier treatment. Now that he's awake, he can tell the doctors if any nasty symptoms are cropping up. I'll get him safely home as soon as possible—but it sounds like the two of you need to . . . keep some space between you . . . for a little while until BB—or maybe both of you—can see all this in perspective. You know, let the initial embarrassment fade a little?"

Raven had teleported out before Robin even finished his last sentence.

A bit late, Beast Boy said, "I'm not _angry_ at her, you know. Just . . . shocked."

Robin looked at him thoughtfully. "I think you should know that Raven's been in here for the last eighteen hours, ever since we deposited you in that bed. Without her healing spells, I bet you'd have died in minutes. There's only been one previous recorded _survivor_ of Lady Viper's bite, and Raven was bound and determined to make sure you were the _second_!"

Beast Boy frowned. "Who was the other one?"

"My friend Batgirl, last year in Gotham. She thought it was because she'd managed to do to herself something similar to what Raven did to you as first aid—incise the wound, then use a miniature suction cup to draw out some of the venom."

"'She thought'? You don't sound convinced."

"No, I'm developing a different theory—checking the records last night, I noticed Batgirl was _also_ the only recorded _female_ victim of Lady Viper's bite, and even acquired the powers of Lady Viper after she finally awoke! I think the magical curse which turned that snake-lady into what she is today may be contagious to other _females_ when bitten, putting them into a coma for a day or two while their bodies change, but just plain kills the guys! If I'm right, then Raven's healing spells probably made all the difference in countering the magical component of the poison in your body. After we got you here, the lab was able to brew up a batch of the same antidote developed in Gotham, but I doubt it mattered at that point . . . "

Robin kept talking and talking, but Beast Boy wasn't really listening. He left the words wash over him while thinking: _Dude! Raven was actually sucking on my neck? And I can't even remember what it _felt_ like? Why do I always have such rotten luck?_

* * *

Meanwhile Raven was speeding back to the Tower, telling herself that _of course_ Beast Boy was disgusted by the icky discovery that she'd tasted his blood, especially for what turned out to be a flawed reason, and now he'd probably avoid her as much as possible, at least for the next couple of months, until his scatterbrained personality fixated on other things and let this unfortunate incident slide away into the back of his mind, filed under the category of "Ancient History I Don't Want To Worry About Any More."

Which was probably a good thing, right? Wasn't she always objecting to his pestering her, trying to get her to play games and listen to his jokes and test-taste his tofu-based cuisine and waste time in lots of other ways when she could be curled up with a good book in the privacy of her own chamber? Heck, under the circumstances, it was a cinch he'd forget all about any future mistletoe ambushes he'd previously planned for this holiday season!

Once back in her room, she sat in mid-air, set her jaw, closed her eyes, and started meditating about nice, relaxing, non-controversial subjects so her emotions would settle down and her pulse would go back to normal.

That was the original _plan_, anyway. But Lady Viper kept creeping into her thoughts. Not exactly conducive to staying _calm_.

Raven kept telling herself that fantasizing about all the unpleasant things she _wanted_ to do to that Jezebel wasn't the right way to keep her emotions firmly in check . . . finally she managed to shove aside that subject for awhile in favor of a less violent topic, to wit: Formulating back-up plans for contriving a real kiss with full lip contact, strictly in the name of testing the limits of her self-restraint under such unprecedented stress . . .

* * *

A couple of hours later:

A doctor had said that Beast Boy's vital signs all looked good, but he ought to rest for at least another couple of days at home before trying any prolonged physical exertion.

Robin got him home. When they arrived at the Tower, Starfire insisted upon hugging her green friend, which wasn't so bad—she actually remembered to restrain her alien strength because of his convalescent condition—and Cyborg clapped him on the shoulder and made some joke about how Lady Viper, after biting him, was probably in worse shape than he was! Beast Boy managed a feeble rejoinder about how Cyborg was welcome to get bitten next time, if he thought it looked so safe and easy!

Raven was nowhere in sight, and Beast Boy decided this wasn't a good time to knock on her door to thank her for all she'd done. It could wait until tomorrow.

Once he was alone in his room, Beast Boy studied a wall calendar, carefully trying to remember just how long the "hunting season" for kissing girls under the mistletoe was supposed to last. Didn't people do it all the time at New Year's Eve parties? That gave him at least until January 1.

Yesterday morning had been the first time in his life he'd ever tried that stunt, and Raven had taken it surprisingly well. Hadn't even thrown him out the window, much less banished him to a dimension of eternal darkness! Such restraint had to be a good sign! With that sort of _encouragement_, he figured he could try it at least once more, sometime in the next couple of days, and see what happened . . .


	5. Chapter 5: Like Oil and Water

**Chapter Five: Like Oil and Water**

Raven had eaten a heftier-than-usual breakfast at an even earlier hour than usual, which meant _far_ earlier than Beast Boy was likely to be ambling into the kitchen looking for sustenance. Then she had retreated to the security of her own room. Raven's current plan was to spend the day locked in here, skipping lunch (when Beast Boy would almost certainly be out there in the kitchen, raiding the refrigerator), and probably supper (ditto), then perhaps venture out to scrounge up some nutrition after midnight—when BB would presumably have conked out again.

Of course that plan would fall apart in ten seconds flat if some supervillain started a rampage and the entire team was summoned to deal with it, but Raven would cross that bridge when she came to it.

Now Raven sat hovering in mid-air, as she often did when alone in her quarters, but for once she wasn't meditating.

Just _brooding_ over recent events.

(An outside observer, had one been present, might have said that the primary difference was that Raven didn't have her eyes closed.)

Yesterday night she'd been embarrassed over Beast Boy waking up and learning that she'd cut his neck and sucked out his blood—worst of all, had done it for a _flawed_ reason. The memory of that blooper was bound to seriously cramp her style the next time she wanted to criticize _his_ ignorance of this, that, or the other thing.

Well, the blush had long since faded and she didn't think it was going to come back on account of that incident, but she had belatedly realized Beast Boy's next reaction—after the news had really sunk in—might be a lot worse than just feeling awkward and avoiding her for a while.

Given the grass stain's love of horror movies, it would not be the least bit surprising if he spent the next couple of weeks convinced that the recent blood-sucking incident was frightening proof that Raven had somehow been infected with vampirism when he wasn't looking. Was he going to start eating a garlic sandwich with each meal in an attempt to keep her at bay? Was he going to load up a squirt pistol with "holy water" and shoot her with it to see what happened?

She could always spend more time out in the sunlight to reassure him that she hadn't been turned into one of the undead—but with her luck, he'd probably decide that she was a vampire after the fashion of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, who had been perfectly capable of strolling around in London by daylight, but evidently couldn't _use_ his evil powers until the sun had set.

Her thoughts were going around and around, along these cheerful themes, when there was a knock on her door. Raven extended her perceptions enough to verify that it was Beast Boy and nobody else. Just ignoring him had its attractions, but might be taken as a sign of weakness. Or guilt. Or something.

She manipulated the lock with a thought and heard it click open. Then she called, "Come in if you have to."

The door swung open. Beast Boy took two steps in and then paused, as if trying to find the right words to express whatever was on his mind.

She decided a preemptive strike was best. Get it out fast before she lost her nerve or he started jabbering about something else. Speaking much more rapidly than normal, she began: "I'm-really-sorry_-_I-cut-you-and-sucked-out-your-blood-it-was-the-recommended-first-aid-in-a-manual-I-studied-in-Azarath—"

Her green friend had blinked several times while she was speaking, and now cut her off with a raised palm. "Slow down! Why are you apologizing?"

Had she been going too fast for him to make out the key words? She tried again. "I said I'm sorry I cut—"

"No, I _heard_ you before. I just don't understand why you're even mentioning it. You also cured the magic snakebite poison, and that's a heck of a lot more important than me losing a few drops of blood! A few scratches in the line of duty never killed me before, so why would be I obsessing over the latest ones?"

"Beast Boy . . . you obsess over all sorts of things. Why _wouldn't_ you pick this one for your latest fixation?" (Raven noticed her latest attempt to be contrite and tactful sure hadn't lasted long . . .)

He scowled. "Well, at least I take an interest in the world around me! I learn new things when I get all wrapped up in another hobby or a new conspiracy theory or whatever! Given a choice, _you'd_ rather just sit here in your room with those dusty old books and _vegetate_ all day, wouldn't you?"

That _had_ been her plan—for the next few days, at least—which hampered her in constructing a really good rebuttal, so she settled for nitpicking over one detail. "You mean _meditate._"

Beast Boy shrugged. "Same difference! Except you've just demonstrated you _never_ miss a chance to tell me I said the wrong word or made some other mistake in the heat of the moment . . . well, I guess that qualifies as an outside interest. Maybe there's hope for you yet?"

Raven hesitated as she tried to sort out the implications of that rejoinder. Was that really how he saw her? As a rhymes-with-witch who was _constantly_ waiting for him to screw up so she could gleefully make petty, insulting remarks at the drop of a hat?

_Okay, so there was the time Starfire was worried that Mad Mod's hypno-screens had ruined his brain, and I expressed surprise at the notion that he even had a brain to be ruined. And then there was the time I accused him of learning his American history from the back of a cereal box. Come to think of it, the first time we met, I had to point out that his insistence on wearing a mask to protect his "secret identity" was _pointless_, because how many other green-skinned guys were running around in this city?_

_And then there was that other time . . . and that other other time . . . and so forth . . ._

_But who'd've thought he would take those little things personally? I swear, some people are so thin-skinned! What about all the _other_ times he did or said something dumb and by sheer force of will I managed to keep my lip zipped? I guess he doesn't bother to keep count of _those_, so he's convinced I never cut him any slack at all? _

_Like a man who breaks the speed limit every day of the week, and gets ticketed three times in six months, and then starts _whining_ that it just proves the cops have targeted him as their favorite person to pull over? _

She was so busy brooding over this for all she was worth that she missed part of something else Beast Boy had said after several seconds of tense silence between them. Raven blinked and said, "Sorry—got distracted—what was that last?"

"Well." He suddenly seemed fascinated by the carpet around his feet as he said tentatively, "I was starting to tell you why I came over and knocked on your door in the first place. (Aside from wanting to say 'thanks' for the healing spells, I mean.) Even though we snipe at each other sometimes, we still have holidays coming up, and we're still friends even if we hardly have anything in common except being Titans together . . . and I still have a couple of Christmas presents to buy before it's too late . . . and I wondered if maybe you had some stuff left on your list too, and then you might want to tag along with me on a shopping trip downtown?"

Raven had taken care of all her holiday shopping weeks ago. Online, of course, with the merchandise delivered to the Tower in plain brown boxes. Who needed the grief of being crowded in with hundreds of other people in a store? The holiday season was so much more tolerable when it involved _as little_ human interaction as possible . . .

So she was extremely surprised when she heard her own voice saying, "Yeah, we can do that."

Beast Boy looked so childishly flabbergasted—and then pleased—at her acceptance that she suddenly felt an urge to scratch him behind the ears as if he were a puppy who had just learned a new trick. The urge was easily restrained, but the scary thing was that she'd even felt it in the first place!


	6. Chapter 6: What They Found at the Mall

**Chapter Six: What They Found at the Mall**

Raven had told Beast Boy to wait a few minutes in the hall—and a few was all it had been before she emerged in nondescript civilian clothes. Dark colors, of course. Black jeans and black blouse with a navy blue jacket over it.

Beast Boy suggested they take the T-Car and Raven nodded silently. On their way down to the garage, he kept glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, thinking about what he might be getting himself into with this invitation.

Naturally Raven's jacket had a big hood she could pull up to put most of her face in its shadow when they got outside; Beast Boy would have been flabbergasted if Raven had voluntarily worn any other sort of jacket. He'd never quite understood _why_ Raven tried to hide her features so much, but he'd long since accepted that she felt more comfortable that way when out in public. You wouldn't think she was shy about attracting attention to her physical appearance, exactly—she sure didn't mind showing off her _legs_ all the time in her standard outfit . . .

Wait. Showing off? That didn't sound like Raven, come to think of it. Maybe . . . maybe it honestly hadn't occurred to her yet that in these last few years she'd matured enough that most guys (Beast Boy included) would think her legs were definitely worth a second look? Not to mention third and fourth looks, if she stuck around long enough? So she just wasn't self-conscious about them, even as she obsessed (for some strange reason) over keeping her _face_ hidden as much as possible when she was out in public?

What was a friend supposed to say to a girl in this situation? _Raven, you probably don't realize this, but nowadays when you run around in that tight leotard that shows off your long legs, you look really hot. If you don't like getting admiring stares from lots of strangers, maybe you should consider a complete redesign of your costume?_

Yeah, right. Telling a girl as touchy as Raven what she should or shouldn't wear, while tossing out unsolicited comments on her physical assets, would really go over well. (Not!)

Heck, maybe she secretly enjoyed having guys admire her legs, as long as they were smart enough not to harass her after they had just _looked_. But asking Raven to confirm or deny _that_ sudden suspicion of his would not lead to anything good, whether it was on the money or way off base.

As a rule of thumb, Beast Boy didn't try to tell girls how to dress—and they usually returned the favor by showing precious little interest in how he dressed. Why rock the boat now?

"One question," Raven said suddenly as she slid behind the wheel of the car (Cyborg seemed to feel Raven was a better driver; he still growled if Beast Boy wanted to borrow the keys.) "Are you planning to shop for _my_ present on this trip? If so, I'd better plan on going off somewhere else for a few minutes until you have it hidden in a bag."

"Naw," he said. "Already got yours." (Actually he had _three_ presents for her locked up in a chest in his room, and hadn't decided which one to go with yet.)

* * *

**Three hours later. **

They approached the mall exit on the side where they had left the T-Car. Beast Boy was carrying a large shopping bag weighted down with several presents. On the other hand, Raven still wasn't carrying anything. Although she hadn't made a point of talking about it, she hadn't actually felt the need to purchase anything during their rambling journey through the mall.

That suggested she already had everything checked off on her list of Christmas presents to buy this year. She would.

But it also raised the question of why she had suddenly agreed to tag along on this trip at all if she didn't have any last-minute shopping to get out of the way. Was it possible she actually liked the idea of being alone with him while doing something halfway normal, such as roaming through a shopping mall?

Oh, who was he kidding? More likely she was gritting her teeth and making a determined effort to prove she could at least _tolerate_ Beast Boy's company – and the presence of crowds of civilians all around her, even if they weren't paying any attention to her -- for a few hours at a stretch. He had a feeling his comment about her wanting to just vegetate in her room indefinitely might have gotten under her skin more than he'd expected at the time . . .

He wasn't complaining, though. Things were going about as well as could be expected. She still hadn't reopened the subject of his mistletoe ambush from the other day, either. As far as he was concerned, that meant that when the time was right, he could try his luck with an encore. Pity there was no mistletoe clearly visible above doorways here in the mall . . . but maybe owners of the mall, and of the individual stores, didn't want to be sued for recklessly encouraging sexual harassment or some such thing?

On the sidewalk outside, there was a Santa Claus standing by a metal tripod supporting a kettle. He was ringing a bell in a desultory sort of way, and a stylishly dressed girl with long ebony hair was dropping something into the kettle with a clink just as Raven and Beast Boy emerged from the doors ten feet away from the tripod. Neither of the Titans paid much attention to the nearby act of charity at first, but then they both froze as they heard the girl (whose back was turned to them) saying, "Happy Holidays! I always like to give what I can for the less fortunate!"

The sentiment was unexceptionable, and the voice expressing it was saturated with self-confidence and a breezy charm—but the mere fact that this voice was saying anything at all, here and now, was a huge danger sign.

As soon as he heard that voice, Beast Boy knew from experience that the speaker was beautiful, witty, graceful, sophisticated, well-traveled, and capable of wrapping a typical teenage boy around her little finger if she cared to make the effort.

She also possessed all the ethics of a particularly hungry piranha which senses your tender flesh has just entered its stretch of river.

In other words, she was Blackfire of Tamaran!

Beast Boy and Raven didn't even need to exchange significant glances before acting. Beast Boy was closer to the newly discovered threat, so he quickly stepped toward Blackfire, weaving around a middle-aged man who was just heading into the store to do his own shopping.

Raven lagged behind a little; Beast Boy knew she'd be doing her part of the drill, which was rapid surveillance of the surrounding area to see if Blackfire had any allies lurking a short distance away, hoping for a chance to blindside two Titans at once when they were focused on the _obvious_ threat.

What Beast Boy _wanted_ was to give Blackfire a nasty scare by clapping a hand on her shoulder from behind, like a cop in a movie, and sternly warning her not to try anything funny. However, given that she had once taught _Robin_ some exciting new martial arts moves, that idea could easily go wrong. (And it was wildly optimistic to assume that she really didn't know he and Raven were somewhere nearby.)

So he settled for something more restrained. He sidled up behind Blackfire and said, in his most nonchalant tone, "Hello, Blackfire. What brings you back to this neck of the woods?"

Whatever reaction he'd expected, it wasn't what he got. Blackfire made a squealing noise, spun around fast, and said gleefully, "Beast Boy!" while opening her arms wide, apparently preparing to . . . hug him?

Working on sheer reflex, Beast Boy stepped back and raised his fists defensively—then suddenly realized how _bad_ it would look if he threw the first punch at a "harmless" and "affectionate" girl. Of course Blackfire was neither of those things, but that wasn't the way a stranger would see it . . .

It didn't come to that. Seeing his combat-ready stance, Blackfire laughed a mocking laugh and lowered her own arms, folding them across her chest as she asked, "A little high-strung today, BB? You know I don't bite!"

"That's a matter of definition," Raven muttered as she moved forward to stand alongside her teammate. "And you still haven't answered his question."

"No? My bad. Got distracted because I was so happy to see a familiar face again—and such a cute one!" Blackfire unfolded her arms so she could render an expressive shrug. "I just thought I'd visit this colorful burg of yours in holiday season for a change; see if it really does bring out the best in Earth-people. Even pick up some nice gift for my little sister to show I'm ready to let bygones be bygones!"

"So who's chasing you this time?" Beast Boy wondered aloud.

Blackfire shook her head and looked mournful. "So young to be so cynical. Why can't you just lighten up and trust people more often, the way _I_ do?"

Beast Boy gaped for a moment at that outrageous accusation, but before he could collect his thoughts Raven took over, saying, "I suppose you _do_ trust people most of the time. You trust them to be dumb enough to fall for your latest scheme, at least. Figuring by the time they start to catch on, you'll already have left town with the loot?"

Blackfire produced a pristine handkerchief from a pocket of her perfectly tailored jacket and held it up in front of her face for a moment, while saying in a subdued voice, "I guess this little reunion just isn't going to work out the way I . . . hoped. Suppose we just go our separate ways and in six months or a year you might be ready to believe I'm trying to turn over a new leaf and just want to chat with my favorite sister and her best buds again?"

Beast Boy hesitated. Without taking his eyes off the villainess who had nearly finagled a marriage between Starfire and a green slug, he asked Raven: "Should we arrest her while we have the chance?"

"On what charges?" Raven inquired. "We know she stole some jewels when she visited the Centauri moons, and later she pulled some dirty tricks on Tamaran, but those places are a little outside of our normal jurisdiction. How many felonies has she committed right here on _Earth_?"

Startled, Beast Boy thought about it hard. Blackfire had originally come here one step ahead of Centauri pursuers and tried to trick them into arresting Starfire instead, but he didn't think local courts would be very interested in that. Okay, Raven had a point. If Blackfire had ever robbed a bank in Jump City, for instance, or anywhere else on the globe, then he sure hadn't heard about it! (He suspected that would change if she lingered on Earth very long after this conversation, but you weren't supposed to imprison people just on suspicion of what they might do in the future if you didn't.)

He grimaced. "All right, Blackfire, you go one way and we'll go another, and there's no need for a fight."

"There sure isn't!" Blackfire agreed sweetly. "And to show there's no hard feelings, perhaps I can convince Santa to come up with something special for such a good little boy and girl this year!"

The corpulent Santa Claus by the charity kettle dropped his bell and shot his right hand into a pocket of his red suit. Meanwhile his left hand yanked away the cotton beard from around his mouth to reveal the pudgy features of . . . Control Freak.

Beast Boy was just starting to change shape when Control Freak's right hand emerged with a remote and squeezed a button.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Recently I was watching the episode "Employee of the Month" again, and I was reminded of a point that had bothered me the first time I saw it: How could a green-skinned Teen Titan work behind the counter of a fast food joint for several days _without_ that fact becoming something of a sensation? None of the customers appeared to notice anything the least bit strange about seeing a green guy standing behind the counter taking their orders, and no journalists showed up to interview him about why he was doing this. No explanation was offered for why those things didn't happen.

On the other hand (I said to myself), this means it's possible that he can go shopping during the holiday season without attracting much attention from the crowds of ordinary people in a Jump City mall (some of whom, you'd think, would be diehard Titans fans). That may be a remarkably illogical assumption—but at least it has the benefit of resting upon a solid foundation of _canonical_ evidence!

(I do remember an army of lovestruck fangirls mobbing Beast Boy in the movie _Trouble in Tokyo_, but I guess that only demonstrates how conspicuous and how popular he is in _Japan_; it doesn't prove a thing about how teenage girls (or any other civilians) normally react to him in Jump City, if they even notice he's there!)


	7. Chapter 7: The Game is Afoot

**Chapter Seven: The Game is Afoot**

Raven still felt completely normal—no pain, no disorientation—but knew what must've happened. They had just been zapped by a souped-up remote from the real world into what was probably the inside of a TV set.

One showing an _old_ movie, apparently . . . everything around her was black and white and all the shades of gray in between. In fact—she glanced down to check—her own skin and clothing had suffered the same transformation. She was standing on a sidewalk in a downtown environment, in broad daylight, and the men and women and automobiles all had an old-fashioned look . . . around the Thirties or Forties, she thought.

Well, how bad could that be? They weren't allowed to show anything so graphic as dismemberment and disembowelment in the black-and-white days, right?

Raven took a moment to review what she knew about the scarier movies of Hollywood's "Golden Age."

Nope, no chainsaw massacres in those days. All you had to worry about was gangsters with tommy guns, and masked desperadoes, and Frankenstein's Monster, and the occasional werewolf or mummy, and maybe Count Dracula creeping into your bedchamber in the middle of the night, and there was always the off chance that King Kong might step on you . . . or, just for a change of pace, you might attract the attention of a psychotic stalker such as The Phantom of the Opera . . .

Um. Okay, maybe it _could_ get pretty rough for an innocent bystander, even in those monochrome days when the bloodstains just looked like black smears against a pale background . . .

Her musings on the situation were cut short by a low groan coming from just around the corner. It sounded suspiciously familiar, so she checked.

Sprawled on the ground in an alley was Beast Boy—although it felt odd to see him looking so gray instead of green. Also odd was the way he was dressed with a trenchcoat and fedora. Who did he think he was, Dick Tracy?

(Even as the question occurred to her, she knew it was unfair. Beast Boy hadn't had any chance to pick out a new wardrobe—must be part of Control Freak's program.)

She crouched beside him, touched his shoulder, and concentrated on focusing her psychic perceptions. There was a bruise on the side of his head, but that was all it was. No cracks in that section of skull, and the brain cells beneath the bone still seemed okay—or should she say _no worse than usual,_ bearing in mind that this was _Beast Boy's_ head she was examining?

But nothing seriously wrong . . . then Beast Boy opened his eyes and started up at her.

"Ow," he muttered. His voice seemed deeper—raspier?—but maybe he just needed to clear his throat.

After a couple of seconds, his gaze focused on Raven's face and he grinned suddenly. "Well, hello there, doll!"

_What?_ Raven rose and hastily stepped back two paces, while saying dubiously, "Beast Boy?"

"Who? Sounds like a sideshow act." His voice still sounded rougher than usual.

Raven was doing some hasty rethinking of her initial assumptions. Was this really her fellow Titan, or just a simulacrum with his face? No, she thought her psychic scan would have picked up on it if he'd been something other than a real human. But last year's tour through a bunch of Control Freak's favorite TV shows had been a surreal experience; she'd never been quite sure how "real" the other people in them were. She thought the football game she'd interrupted had been real . . . but come to think of it, she'd never double-checked afterwards to find out if the real live football players remembered it the same way she did.

On the other hand, she and Beast Boy had been zapped at the same time. They should have ended up in the same place—right?

She decided to stick with that theory until further evidence came along. A teammate deserved the benefit of the doubt. "Okay, if you don't answer to 'Beast Boy,' then just who are you?"

His gloved hands were brushing at his trenchcoat, trying to shake off some clumps of mud, as he said: "Brad Bolton's the name, private inquiries are the game. I was poking around in the Chinatown pawnshops, trying to catch a whiff of a curio a client is dead set on recovering, when something hit me like a ton of bricks . . . and then you came along."

"So tell me . . . Brad . . . who would want to clobber you?"

"Not sure. Maybe some hood I sent up the river finally got paroled and decided to give me a special scalp massage." He rubbed the sore spot on his head. "But if it was _personal_, you'd think he wouldn't stop after just one swing. Reckon it's more likely some share-the-wealth type wanted to lift my leather and could see I wouldn't cough up the moolah without a fight."

"Lift your leather?"

"Swipe my wallet," he translated. Raven could see now that her friend was still wearing his regular uniform underneath his trenchcoat; Beast Boy patted at his hips and sighed. "Yeah, I must've been rolled." Then he slapped at his left armpit and growled, "Ah, no! They even took my rod!"

"You mean a gun? Beast Boy, you don't carry firearms! You're not even old enough for a permit for a concealed weapon!"

"Are you kidding, doll? I'm old enough to vote."

"When did you turn eighteen? "

He stared at her. "Voting age is _twenty-one_. You from another country?"

Ah. Raven couldn't recall, offhand, when the U.S. Constitution had acquired its Twenty-Sixth Amendment, but apparently it had been after this movie was made. She said truthfully, "As a matter of fact, I did grow up on a distant island . . ." (An island floating in the void of another dimensional reality, rather than being surrounded by an ocean, but there was no need to confuse the issue.)

Beast Boy shrugged, already losing interest in the matter. "Just wondered. The point is I'm old enough to vote, drink whiskey, pack a rod, run a detective agency . . . so what's this 'boy' stuff? People _have_ called me a 'beast' before," he added in the tone of a man who was trying hard to be fair.

Raven wished she knew more about hard-boiled pulp fiction and film noir. Was Beast Boy a bigger fan of that junk than she had realized? Did that make him more susceptible to whatever Control Freak had done to them? (More importantly: If he were in his right mind, perhaps because Raven went in and stirred up his real memories to bring them to the fore, would he know the entire plot of this movie the way he'd known how to overcome a Space Samurai in the universe of _Clash of the Planets_?)

On the other hand, a psychic intrusion into his brain, without his permission, was not an appetizing prospect. Would sweet reason work on him—for once?

"Look," she said, "my name's Raven. You don't remember, but we've met before. Even worked together on other cases."

"Well, that's a new approach," he said, tilting his head as he studied her carefully. "Normally a hot tomato like yourself would just say, 'Haven't we met somewhere?' Leaves a graceful way out in case I ain't interested in playing along."

This was probably the first time in her life that Raven had been accused of _pretending_ to be some stranger's old acquaintance just so she'd have an excuse to keep talking to him after he'd caught her eye . . . but she kept a lid on her temper. _This isn't really Beast Boy speaking; it's the brainwashing,_ she reminded herself. _And if I can get him out of this movie, maybe he'll snap back to normal. That would be an improvement—at least marginally—over this "tough guy from seventy years ago" routine. _

"Take my hand and brace yourself for a shock," she said, extending her own left hand.

Beast Boy grasped it carefully. "Okay, lady, but what's the shock—"

Then he gulped as he found out. Raven levitated both of them straight up, up, and away, until they were hovering a hundred feet above street level, which meant they were also above all the nearby buildings.

Raven had half-expected so much sudden vertical movement to take them right out of the movie and into whatever another TV was showing at this moment; she _thought_ that was the way this had worked that other time Control Freak turned them into digital gate-crashers.

Not this time! Scanning her surroundings, she could see all the way to the horizon and there was no clear sign of any shimmering boundary or other limit to this "world." As a matter of fact, some of the taller buildings a mile or so away looked suspiciously like ones in modern Jump City . . . had this movie been set there, several skyscrapers ago?

"I'm dreaming," Beast Boy was muttering beside her. "Maybe somebody slipped me the needle and now I _feel_ higher than a kite, so I think I really am?" As Raven glanced over at him, he added with a clumsy gallantry, "Of course as long as the company is easy on the eyes, I'm not in much hurry to wake up. Besides, when I was a kid I always wondered what this felt like for Peter Pan."

Raven instinctively looked toward the island in the bay where the Tower ought to be. Of course it wasn't. Just a little clump of land sticking up above the seawater. "I think we're stuck here for awhile—so we need a place to sit down and talk. Know any good prospects?"

"My office," he said immediately. "In the Wein Building—Barreto Street."

"Good enough." Raven started flying them in that direction.

"I was thinking of catching a streetcar," he said in a carefully controlled voice.

"This is faster."

He took a hint and shut up for the rest of the flight. Raven supposed he was being the strong, silent type. An interesting change of pace from the Beast Boy she remembered, who would've been talking her ear off all along the way.

**Author's Note:** I know, I know. Not much happened in this chapter. I was originally planning to have it go another thousand words or more after they arrive at the small office of a one-man detective agency, but finally decided to post what I already had. The planned scene with Raven trying, at length, to persuade Beast Boy that he isn't really a hard-boiled private eye in the 1930s, but rather a teen superhero from the 2000s who can change into any type of animal, will just have to wait.


	8. Chapter 8: Checking in at the Office

**Author's Note:** To clarify something about the current setting and other circumstances as this chapter opens: Control Freak recently zapped Raven and Beast Boy into the world of a film noir production from around the late 30s or 40s. I haven't decided what the title of the movie is, but it's not a "real" movie you could find in a video store. However, as will become more apparent in the _next_ chapter, the movie seems to have points in common with _The Maltese Falcon_ (the classic version with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor), just as Control Freak's beloved "Warp Trek" series (which he was raving about in his first appearance) presumably had a lot in common with an obscure little thing which we call "Star Trek."

Raven remembers exactly who she is and where she came from, but for some reason Beast Boy's mind has become totally immersed in the role of Brad Bolton, the tough-talking private eye who was the lead of this black-and-white film. Presumably Control Freak deliberately picked a film in which the action hero had the initials B.B., and then programmed his remote to program Beast Boy into thinking he was that action hero. (I'm working on the theory that Beast Boy is _extremely susceptible_ to hypnotism and the like, as evidenced by how easy it was for Mad Mod to keep zapping him that way in the episode "Detention.")

Of course my primary motive here is to give Beast Boy a chance to say things to and about Raven that he would be exceedingly unlikely to say if he were in his right mind. (I considered various other genres when deciding where the two would end up after Control Freak zapped them, but finally decided I was in the mood to try writing something in the voice of a hard-boiled detective of the old school, and thought it would be particularly amusing to cast BB in that uncharacteristic role.)

That's _my_ motive. The villains presumably have different motives for leaving two Titans stranded inside an old movie for the time being. Okay, I admit Control Freak's motive is probably very, very simple: Blackfire batted her eyelashes at him and asked him to do it—so he did! After all, we already know he has a crush on Starfire, and Blackfire strongly resembles her sister, _except_ for such tiny differences as darker hair and sociopathic behavior. Blackfire's own motives in this story are still mysterious, though. (Give it a couple of chapters and we'll be seeing her again.)

* * *

**Chapter Eight: Checking in at the Office**

**From the case files of Brad Bolton, private eye.**

I couldn't make heads or tails of this weird dame with the hood who kept calling me "Beast Boy."

She could fly through the air and carry me along as freight, but I just plain don't believe in witchcraft.

She had a pair of gams that wouldn't quit, and the way she showed them off you'd think she was a showgirl up on the stage when the chorus line is doing its big number in a musical comedy.

I swear she didn't know how to flirt, though. What kind of showgirl can't turn on the charm to soften a guy up?

Or maybe I just wasn't worth the trouble? Naw, that was silly; I'm _always_ worth the trouble!

Had to be that she just didn't have much practice. She'd said something about growing up on an island. Maybe one of those tropical spots where people wear less clothes so they don't keel over from heatstroke? Maybe she'd attended a local girls' school run by nuns and still didn't know much about dealing with guys?

One thing I was pretty sure of: She hadn't been hired to spy on me. If my latest client's rivals—or any other enemies I'd attracted over the years—had wanted to plant someone on me, they might send a real hot tomato, but they'd make darn sure they coached her with a nice simple story that I might actually believe without thinking twice. They'd want her to call me by my right name, too. All this junk about "you're Beast Boy and we know each other well" just _hurt_ her credibility—which meant she was probably _sincere_ when she said it.

Sincere but crazy? Maybe.

Or she had me mixed up with some other ruggedly handsome galoot? Another serious possibility.

But deliberately lying in order to impress me? Forget about it; the lies would have made more sense!

Thinking about all this helped keep me from tossing my cookies while we were flying through the air to the Wein Building. Apparently she knew her way around town pretty well; she didn't need to ask me for directions. We touched down, soft as feathers, on the roof.

The door leading to the top of the stairwell wasn't locked—maybe somebody had been doing some maintenance. Not that it mattered much—I had a duplicate key for that lock just in case, although the owner of the building was blissfully unaware of that. Anyway, I led Raven down to the third floor where I had a two-room office.

I'd left the front door open in case anyone wanted to sit and wait while I was out. Nobody had, but there were a few letters on the floor which the postman must've shoved through the slot. I crouched to scoop them up and then remembered to hold the door open for the young lady. She strolled in and studied the area, but there wasn't anything to catch her interest for long.

The outer room had a desk for a secretary, but there was no one sitting behind it. My latest girl Friday had quit just yesterday, saying something about too much violence in my line of work. I swear, some of these modern city girls get rattled over every little thing. A country girl who'd grown up using rifle and shotgun wouldn't throw a fit over a thug storming in and pulling a handgun on me, as happened the other day. Hey, it wasn't like he'd managed to fire it at anything before I broke his wrist and loosened his teeth, so why all this guff about "excessive violence"?

I didn't bother to tell Raven about my labor retention problems. I just told her to grab a seat anywhere if she was tired (there were an old couch and a couple of wooden chairs in the outer office, besides the swivel chair behind the secretary's desk), and then I unlocked the door to my private office.

Instead of trying the couch, she just followed me in and started talking about how there was no time to waste in getting out of "here" and finding out what Control Freak and Blackfire were up. I'd never heard of those guys and didn't much care what they were doing, but I didn't bother saying so right away.

There was still an embarrassing vacancy in my shoulder holster, so I used another key to open a cabinet and took out a Colt .45 to replace the gat gone astray. While this Raven dame kept chattering about the whole world around us being an illusion, I cracked open a box of cartridges and started filling a clip. As dad always used to say: _A gun without ammo is like a horse without legs._

After I was properly heeled again, I sat down behind my own desk, reached for the letter opener, and started on the mail.

Raven didn't like that. "Are you listening to me?"

"No, I went completely deaf five minutes ago." (My way of hinting it was a silly question—I was a detective and nobody else was hanging around my office at the moment, so what else would I be listening to?)

"You could at least look at me when I'm talking to you." Yep, she definitely sounded miffed.

I glanced up at her for about two seconds—just in case fleeting eye contact would make her feel better—before returning my gaze to the phone bill I'd just opened. "Lady, if you expect me to just stare at you constantly to make it clear I'm hanging on your every word, you ought to get a job on stage and send me a ticket to the performance. This is the real world and I've got a business to run. Nobody's paying me to worry about _your_ troubles, so count yourself lucky I'm even listening with half an ear while I do a few chores."

She looked very annoyed—okay, so I was glancing at her pretty face again in spite of my big talk about having better things to do—but she actually took several seconds to think things over before she replied this time. Then: "Okay, so you don't remember we're friends. So you're worried about making ends meet. So you charge for your time when strangers want you to do stuff for them. I can work with that. What if—"

She was interrupted by the sound of someone in the hall, just starting to rattle the knob on the outer door. It wasn't locked, but sometimes it sticks a bit.

I think Raven turned into a black shadow—leaving her hooded cloak behind—and slipped right through the wall between the two rooms to get out there before the person in the hall got the door open. Yeah, I know that doesn't make sense, but that was what it looked like. By the time I had slid out from behind my desk and made it into the front room to greet the newcomer, Raven was already seated behind the secretary's desk and was looking very serious and businesslike.

The door opened to reveal a gent with the sort of figure that would make Santa Claus look undernourished.

* * *

**Author's Note:** I've already written part of the next chapter, but decided this was a convenient breaking point. After the next chapter, we'll probably switch back to the "real world" for a bit to see what's happening to the other Titans now that Raven and Beast Boy have mysteriously vanished from beyond their ken.


	9. Chapter 9: A Fat and Jolly Fellow

**Chapter Nine: A Fat and Jolly Fellow**

**From the case files of Brad Bolton, private eye.**

One look at the fellow in the doorway made you think someone had taken the raw material for three men, boiled it down to lard, and poured it into one huge bag of skin. As he stepped into the outer room, he was already wiping his forehead with a well-starched handkerchief. I guess the exertion of opening a stuck door had just been too much for him. Or maybe it was the twenty-five foot walk from the elevator to my office that had worn him down before he ever started rattling the knob?

His gaze drifted across the room to me. "Mister Bolton, I presume?"

I nodded. His voice was so smooth and good-humored that he could have made his living on one of the big radio shows.

For all I knew, maybe he did—it would explain his air of prosperity. He was far and away the best-dressed fatty I ever saw. You'd reckon a guy with that much avoirdupois, when wearing a three-piece suit as white as a penguin's belly, would have a row of vest buttons straining so hard that they'd look liable to burst off at any moment. But this gent's vest must've been made to order by a very talented haberdasher; those buttons were snug but not taut, looking perfectly happy with their present jobs, as if they wouldn't dream of quitting on short notice. (Me, I just buy off the rack and hope for the best.)

While I was sizing him up, the fatty had been observing me too. After a few moments he said, "I have heard, sir, that you are a veritable bloodhound in this city that you know so well. I am here to commission your services, hoping that together we may soon complete an odyssey which has carried me across three continents. Shall we step into your private office so I may elucidate upon the details of my requirements?"

"Uh . . . " I was thinking hard. There were a couple of chairs in the inner office besides mine, but this fellow was a lot broader in the beam than anything I'd foreseen when I was furnishing the place. I'm a plain-spoken man by preference, but saying _You're so fat you'd be spilling over the edges of the plain wooden chair, or else would find the one with arms to be a painfully tight squeeze, _didn't feel like the right way to go.

The fatty's eyebrows went up as he noticed I wasn't answering his suggestion one way or the other.

Then Raven bailed me out. "I believe what Mr. Bolton wishes to say is that a gentleman of your ample proportions might be more comfortable with the extra . . . elbow room . . . provided by that couch just to your right. He simply doesn't have one in the inner office."

(Okay, that sounded a lot better than anything I'd been coming up with.)

"Delicately put, my dear young lady," the fatty said, his wide pink face beaming at her, and then he bestowed that same jolly look upon me as the fancy sentences continued rolling off his tongue. "And _you_ are to be congratulated, sir, for your good fortune in finding a secretary who is possessed of a fine discernment in how to offer tactful suggestions when addressing a stranger who might be, shall we say, a trifle oversensitive about other persons' perceptions of his own girth."

_Secretary?_ I took another look at Raven. Sitting in the secretary's usual spot, she had the desk camouflaging the lower half of her body (unless you were standing near the wall, just to one side of her, as I was). I realized a man standing where the fatty was would never know that the black thing on her arms and torso was a legless leotard—instead of a snug sweater, or maybe the top half of a long-sleeved dress?

"Not that I fall into that category," the prospective client was adding virtuously as I was still regarding Raven. "No, sir! I know precisely what my own proportions are and I make no attempt to shave any of those figures; not by so little as half an inch below the simple truth. For if a man dare not face his own measurements, how shall he ever trust himself to take the measure of other men?"

I wondered if he meant he was a tailor. Always measuring guys for their new suits? That could explain how his own clothes fit him so well.

"So what brings you here, Mister . . . " I let it trail off, and he didn't miss the hint.

"Gilder, sir. Horace K. Gilder, Esquire." He extended one broad paw to me, and I shook it. His hand was moist, but his grip was firmer than I'd reckoned. Not that he tried to turn it into a contest. After a moment his fingers loosened, I pulled my hand back, and the fatty moved toward the couch and carefully lowered his bulk onto it.

"Most comfortable," he said politely. "But before we delve into the matter which weighs upon my mind, may I inquire into just how long this charming young lady has served as your secretary, and thus just how much confidence you have in her discretion?"

I could have told him Raven wasn't my secretary. I could have said I'd just met her today and didn't know how much of a blabbermouth she was. But for some reason I didn't. Instead I just shrugged and said, "If what you've got is too hot for the lady to hear, then maybe I don't need to hear it either. My secretary would type up my final report for you, anyhow—assuming we end up doing business."

(It was a true statement; I simply forgot to mention one tiny detail: _Raven_ wasn't likely to be the secretary who would take down my dictation and turn it into a typescript when the time came.)

He nodded agreeably, all his chins quivering in the process. "A salient point, sir, and I readily acknowledge it. But I feel very little concern over what secrets might leak out _after_ you have already earned your fee in full, for I do not propose to linger in this metropolis once I have the item which brought me here."

I didn't like his reference to "after" I had earned a fee by getting whatever it was he wanted. I decided to crack down on that point right away. "Mr. Gilder, I'm not a lawyer who works on a 'contingency' basis where he only gets paid if his side _wins_. I charge by the day and I don't guarantee the happiest results. For instance, if you had me follow a guy around to see if he secretly visited someone else you were looking for, and if I tailed the guy for a week and never found what you wanted, you'd still owe me for my trouble."

"Indubitably, sir, indubitably! The laborer is worthy of his hire. Perhaps I misspoke in my casual use of the term 'fee.' Perhaps it would have been more felicitous to speak of a generous _bonus _to be disbursed under certain circumstances, above and beyond your well-earned per diem which shall be paid in any event!"

"All right, then. Why don't you tell me just what you're thinking of paying me to do—if you're ready to take a chance on trusting both of us to keep our lips zipped about your affairs, I mean."

"Lips . . . zipped?" He blinked at me and then chuckled politely. "A colorful idiom, sir, which brings to mind strange images. How would one go about installing the zippers? But I believe I _shall_ outline the nature of the problem, and trust both you and the lady to hold these details strictly in confidence."

Gilder linked his fingers together and rested his hands across his broad belly, about where the navel ought to be. "I understand, Mister Bolton, that you recently accepted a commission to search for a certain jade figurine. A Burmese carving of a fairy bluebird, in fact; said to have been greatly prized by Emperor Ch'ien-lung himself. A birthday gift from his—"

I had a nasty feeling that he could go on like that for a long, long time, so I cut him off with a raised hand. "I don't care about the ancient history. And if you want to offer me some dough to help you find it, you're a day late and a dollar short. I already took a retainer from someone else who thinks it's in this city."

"Ah, yes, and how is lovely little Harriet doing?"

When I play poker, I win more than I lose. But in this case it didn't matter if I could keep my face straight or not; I didn't know any Harriet. I only had to give him an honest-to-goodness confused look as I asked: "Who?"

Gilder chuckled an indulgent chuckle. "Perhaps the young lady failed to share her proper name with you, sir! Embellishing her stories with the occasional falsehood is one of her more endearing foibles. Pray permit me to describe her for you. Five foot two, long light brown hair, trim build, porcelain complexion, snub nose, favors green in her wardrobe, speaks with a bit of a Boston accent, often sounds more than a little bewildered by the complexities of this wicked world . . . have _you_ seen her?" he inquired, suddenly turning his gaze on Raven.

"No." It was the same relentlessly serious tone she used for almost anything she said. I recognized the description all right, but thought I'd kept my face blank as Gilder rattled it off.

The fatty eyed her speculatively. "That is remarkable; I should think that a young lady wishing to retain a detective's services would enter this office as a necessary preliminary. And if she did arrive here during business hours, surely the sleuth's personal secretary would become familiar with her?"

That wasn't a question, and Raven didn't bother to answer it. I was pretty sure that even if she knew who he was talking about, she wouldn't have gotten all flustered or tried to invent elaborate explanations to cover up a nice simple lie.

At any rate, I said pleasantly: "If you expect me to confirm or deny anything about what my current client looks like, you're barking up the wrong tree, Mr. Gilder. I offer reasonable confidentiality to the people who need me."

"But you already conceded that you _were_ retained to seek out the Bluebird."

"Sure. Why not? I spent all morning talking to pawnbrokers in Chinatown about jade birds. Any one of them—or anybody else who overheard one of those chats—could've told you what I was looking for, and I guess someone did. From there it's an easy bet that I'm working for someone else, so why waste time denying that much? But that doesn't mean I will tell you the client's name, or gender, or anything else you don't _already_ know."

"Eminently practical, sir! I like a man who knows when to yield on minor points yet stand firm on major ones; it suggests he is a man one can do business with. Let me put my cards on the table, sir. I want the Bluebird, and I will pay sixty thousand dollars in cold cash to the man or woman who delivers it to me intact. Has your client made an offer to match that?"

"Doesn't matter," I said flatly. "My client has already retained me. I don't drop a client in the middle of a case without a good justification, such as he or she gets arrested for murder. And I don't take money from two people at once to do the same job—not unless they were working as partners when hiring me in the first place."

"Ah! But is what I want really the same thing as what your other client wanted of you, sir? Did you agree to move heaven and earth to _deliver_ the bird into her dainty little hands, or did you merely agree to do all you could to _locate_ it and then _report_ its whereabouts to her? If the latter description more closely fits the terms of the obligation you undertook, then you could find the bird, sell it to me, inform her that _I_ now had possession of it, and thereby have fulfilled your contract with her to the letter, sir. To the very letter!"

A horrible suspicion was gnawing at my gut—earlier I'd said I wasn't a lawyer, but this fatty just might be one himself! Who else would come up with such a hair-splitting argument for how I could have my cake and eat it too by finding the Bluebird and charging two clients at once for what I might call _slightly_ different services rendered to each? Not that I had any intention of pulling such a shyster trick—but it told me ugly things about Gilder that he could make the suggestion in the first place.

Raven's face showed she was just about as thrilled with this would-be client as I was, but she wasn't saying anything to interrupt our chat. After all, it was my agency and she was just visiting. So it was up to me to find the right words to get him out the door. I told myself that being polite might get rid of him faster than being loud and angry, and opened my mouth to explain my—

The phone rang on the secretary's desk. Raven picked it up and said, as smoothly as if she'd been doing it for years, "Brad Bolton Detective Agency."

After a little chit-chat back and forth with whoever was on the line, she covered the mouthpiece with one hand and told me: "The police want you to come down to the morgue to identify a body."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Coming up in the next chapter, we get a look at what's happening back in the "real world" now that two of the Titans are missing and their friends back at the Tower don't know what the problem is.

A word of reassurance: Although this chapter's fat man resulted from my sudden, strange desire to try to write a pastiche of the fat man who was a major figure in Dashiell Hammett's _The Maltese Falcon_, I don't plan to stretch out this particular subplot about the "stuck in a hard-boiled private eye movie" for anywhere near as long as Hammett's novel lasted. Just long enough for Beast Boy to do and say a few things which Raven will find herself wishing he'd do and say when he was in his right mind, shall we say. After all, sooner or later I've got to steer this plot closer to a chapter I already wrote months ago, in which Raven visits Nevermore and has a frank talk with some of her emotions about romantic issues.


	10. Chapter 10: Meanwhile, Back at the Tower

**Author's Note:** And now comes the moment _nobody_ was asking for. (But when did that ever stop me?) We get to see Control Freak's perspective for an entire chapter.

* * *

**Chapter Ten: Meanwhile, Back at the Tower**

Blackfire had made a good point when she first suggested an alliance. One villain (or even two) going up against _five_ Titans at once was probably overambitious. It sure hadn't worked for Control Freak when he fought the first five, and it hadn't worked when he found himself tangling with Titans East while they were the pinch-hitters watching over Jump City.

Heck, fighting the original team all at once hadn't even worked for _Trigon._ Control Freak wouldn't have bet his life on his own gadgets, however brilliantly designed, being a good match for a demon lord's raw power in a face-to-face showdown. But the Teen Titans had coped just fine. The results spoke for themselves: when the dust had cleared, Trigon had vanished from this plane of existence—forever, the heroes said—and _they_ hadn't taken a single casualty in the course of kicking his butt!

As Blackfire had suggested, there was a simple lesson to be learned from the historical record. It didn't matter who you were or what you could do; taking on five Titans at once just _wasn't_ cost-effective! "Divide and conquer" was the right way to go, she'd insisted, and Control Freak had listened to her sales pitch and then agreed to try it her way.

(Especially since she kept flirting with him. Oddly enough, most of the girls he had met didn't seem to recognize his finer qualities. But Blackfire obviously appreciated an inventive genius when she saw one, and she was just as beautiful as her sister, and a lot cooler!)

Blackfire was a firm believer in misdirection and the element of surprise. Control Freak had access to video feeds from across the city. When his facial-recognition software had zeroed in on a certain shopping mall as two Titans strolled in, the co-conspirators had activated Plan Three.

Control Freak had dressed up like Kris Kringle while Blackfire prepared to make herself ostentatious as the decoy, knowing their quarries would identify her as an immediate threat while their eyes automatically dismissed the fat guy in the red suit and white beard. A classic application of Purloined Letter technique—Raven and Beast Boy had _seen_ him, sure enough, but their brains only interpreted "Santa" as a normal piece of the environment at this time of year. The look on Beast Boy's face when he suddenly found himself facing the business end of Control Freak's remote had been priceless!

Control Freak just hoped the recording equipment back at his current base was getting everything on video so he could play back the adventures of BB and Raven at his leisure. It was disappointing that he couldn't just sit down and monitor it all realtime—but Blackfire had insisted that after two of the Titans were rendered harmless for the time being, the best bet was to strike while the iron was hot, before the others began to smell something amiss.

Now he was just fiddling with a few last-minute adjustments to his gear to make sure he had all the right subroutines just a few button-pushes away before they took on the other sixty percent of the core team.

Blackfire had waited patiently—if folding her arms and steadily tapping her right forefinger against her left bicep counted as "patiently," which he rather thought it did. She had kept her mouth shut instead of nagging at him, after all. That was already an improvement over how most people reacted if he was ignoring them for a few minutes while playing with his toys.

At any rate, when he finally asked if she was ready to hit the Tower now, Blackfire was all smiles again. "Lead on, big boy!" she said, chucking him under the chin with the same elegant forefinger that had been tapping monotonously a minute ago.

Control Freak pushed the button currently programmed to access the main lounge in Titans Tower, and in the blink of an eye he and Blackfire rode the airwaves to that spot and began peering out at the area from the odd corner of reality which he called "TV Land."

As luck would have it, Starfire, Cyborg, and Robin were all in the lounge at that moment. They started to react to seeing larger-than-life images of Control Freak and Blackfire on the huge wall screen—then Control Freak pushed another button and he and his partner were there in the flesh, standing right in front of that screen—and the three heroes kept right on reacting, but not entirely the way he had expected.

Starfire went airborne and she and Blackfire started slinging starbolts back and forth, fast and furious—no surprise there! Control Freak preferred to stay out of that quarrel. Blackfire had made it clear she was aching for a rematch after the way her sister had deposed her in a duel the last time around. Correcting that was a matter of honor, apparently. He wouldn't have felt right about attacking Starfire anyway; she was so doggone cute!

But Robin and Cyborg behaved . . . oddly. The leader of the Titans yelled, "Cyborg! Box!" And Cyborg turned on his heel and began running toward a door at the end of this level. It led to a stairwell, if Control Freak remembered right from his last invasion of this place.

Bizarre behavior, but much more _urgent_ was this: Robin launched a flying kick at Control Freak which might have cleaned his clock if Control Freak had still been standing there when Robin's steel-toed boot arrived in the space he'd been occupying a second earlier. Fortunately, a quick button-press had zapped him twenty feet to the left.

"Box?" Control Freak asked, while absently thumbing his remote once again and bringing a large collection piece of computer equipment to life so it could start grappling with Robin before something terrible happened (such as Robin getting his hands on Control Freak). "Is he supposed to find some gloves and challenge me to go three rounds in the ring, winner take all?"

"Not quite . . . what . . . I meant," Robin grunted as he pulled a printer cable away from his neck. Unfortunately for him, the DSL cable now had his ankles tied together and a power cord was coiling itself around his left wrist. Meanwhile, the digital face on the monitor was chortling.

A stray starbolt made a sizzling sound as it struck the floor midway between the two guys, and Control Freak hastily said, "Let's move out of the way and give those girls some privacy for their family feud, shall we?"

He started down the corridor in pursuit of Cyborg. The transmogrified computer/robot followed at a respectful distance, carrying Robin, whom it now had trussed up and helpless . . . for the time being. (Given that Robin had been trained by one of the world's greatest escape artists, Control Freak knew this wouldn't last indefinitely, but it should give him a breathing space to deal with the Cyborg problem.)

"So," he said as he reached the stairwell door and zapped it open with a wave of his remote, "just what did you mean when you told Cyborg to 'box'?"

Robin, not surprisingly, wasn't in the mood to explain himself. Control Freak took a moment to ponder. "Box" could be a noun as well as a verb; maybe Robin had been talking about a container instead of a fighting style?

Then it dawned on him. Cyborg might be running _away_ from something—the awe-inspiring combo of Control Freak and Blackfire, for instance—or he might be running _toward_ something else!

A secret weapon? Hidden in an ordinary cardboard box in a storage room full of similar boxes for protective camouflage? Something that any Titan could find and use in a hurry if things went to pot, but no intruder would ever give that one special box a second look until it was too late? If so, keeping a hostage handy was definitely a good idea.

Better pick up the pace! He moved down the stairs as quickly as he dared. He wasn't too worried about being attacked in the stairwell—running away just to turn around and stage an ambush a moment later wasn't Cyborg's style. And any weapon the metallic Titan might be racing to find wasn't likely to be stored on the stairs where someone in a hurry could trip over it and break his fool neck. All the same, Control Freak kept his remote aimed ahead as he hurried down the steps, ready to zap first and ask questions later if anything surprising happened. (He'd thought about sending the robot/Robin combo ahead first, but decided that right now, using Robin as a human shield was more trouble than it was worth if it would block his view of whatever Cyborg might be ready to do.)

Nothing did—but when he was one flight further down, Control Freak's remote detected Cyborg's distinctive electronic emissions signature, about fifty feet away on that same level of the Tower.

A few seconds later he came around a corner just in time to see Cyborg scrambling into some sort of large, free-standing, metallic box. Larger than a refrigerator. Actually, it took Control Freak longer than it should have to make the connection. The box was just about the shape and size, though not the color, of the TARDIS in the _Doctor Who_ shows.

Reluctant to send any high-powered pulses that might trigger whatever was lurking inside that box, Control Freak shifted a finger on his remote and pushed a "Scan" button that should promptly give him a full diagnostic of whatever Cyborg was in such a hurry to reach.

The heavy door slammed shut a moment later, but Control Freak scarcely noticed—he was still squinting at the readout on a tiny screen on the unit in his hand. _Nothing_ of any interest, technologically speaking, was inside that box? (Except for Cyborg himself, natch.) Then what was the point?

"I don't believe it," he mused. "Is the big guy just burying his head in the sand and hoping I won't come after him?"

Don't be silly," the still-immobilized Robin said, sounding more amused than offended. "Cyborg's not afraid of _you_."

"Well, it sure looks like it!"

"No," Robin said, "he's afraid of what _I'm_ going to do."

Control Freak turned around and blinked at his mouthy prisoner. "Did you get whacked on the head when I wasn't looking? Why would Cyborg think _you_ were his biggest problem right now?"

"Delta-Charlie-November-Oscar-Three-Eight, _Execute,_" Robin said quickly, and then a strange whining noise began from somewhere else in the building.

Control Freak spun around, looking for the source of the sound and not finding it. He turned back to Robin. "What's that? Sounds like something's booting up."

"Close enough," Robin said agreeably. "Or preparing to shut down, depending on how you look—"

He was interrupted by a sound like a muffled explosion; probably from the next level down.

The brief vibration in the floor wasn't nearly strong enough to make Control Freak lose his footing; the noise wasn't deafening; the walls and ceiling weren't caving in; no sound or smell of fire in the distance—but it had to mean something!

He decided to bite the bullet and use his remote on the door currently protecting Cyborg. He aimed and clicked. The door didn't budge an inch. In fact, the remote was strangely quiet. No lights, no beeps, no LED activity on the tiny screen, and it didn't matter how hard he squeezed any of the buttons. Control Freak dropped the useless unit and shoved both hands into pockets—left hand into his trousers, right hand into an inside pocket of his trench coat—pulled out two more remotes and started fingering their controls. If one button didn't work, maybe another would?

_Teleport. Transform. Bring furniture to life. Zap Robin into the nearest TV screen or monitor. Do something. Anything!_

Nothing . . . nothing . . . and even _more_ nothing happened in response to his best efforts!

The transmogrified computer console was no longer exerting itself; Robin had easily managed to pry himself loose from the inert cables while Control Freak was still frantically testing his backup weapons. Now the Boy Wonder started advancing

And Control Freak started backing away, glumly aware that if Robin got within arm's reach of him, their fight would be over in an embarrassingly short time.

Robin made a flourish and somehow one of his gloved hands now held a pair of handcuffs. "Why not hold out your wrists and make it easy on yourself?"

"Not yet," Control Freak insisted, whipping out his last backup remote and noting, without much surprise, that it was doing no better than the other three. "Whatever you did can't last forever."

Robin smiled. "As far as anything in your pockets is concerned, the damage is already done. That noise came from an Electromagnetic Pulse Generator. Very limited range. Everything on the mainland ought to be okay. We hated the idea of doing this to our own headquarters—but we also hated the idea of you running wild in here, so we made preparations anyway."

The light was belatedly dawning. Control Freak said: "Okay, I never seriously expected that! After all, having a bunch of electronics crash is just a nuisance for most of you guys, but for Cyborg . . ."

"It could be _fatal,_" Robin agreed. "Certainly painful, with probable damage to stored memories. Sure, he keeps most of his data backed up in other locations for a rainy day, but why risk it? Anything inside that box is guaranteed to be 100 percent shielded if the door is shut before the pulse goes off." Now Robin was snapping the cuffs onto a dejected Control Freak's wrists and asking cheerfully, "Did you think he was running for our secret weapon? He was running to _hide_ from it!"

"Must have gone against the grain," Control Freak said sadly. "I _thought_ he was acting out of character . . ."

He wasn't quite as depressed as he sounded, though. Okay, so he'd fallen into a trap, but he still had an extra ace up his sleeve. He'd rather not mention it just yet.

He had thought to use Robin as a hostage—but heck, he already had two other hostages, even if their friends didn't know it yet! Raven and Beast Boy had vanished off the face of the earth, and no one but Control Freak knew how to bring them back. When the time was ripe, he'd mention this to the remaining Titans and then start listing his demands. Freeing him and Blackfire would be a good place to start. Control Freak knew that if Robin, in his capacity as team leader, made a solemn promise to turn them loose with a good head start after Raven and Beast Boy were restored to their friends, he'd keep his word and the other Titans would have to go along.

Snatching victory—or at least a negotiated truce—from the jaws of defeat might even prove to be a good way to make Blackfire warm up to him some more! Assuming she'd been defeated by her sister Starfire by now, which (based on the outcome of their last one-on-one duel) seemed a near certainty.

Naturally Control Freak had never shared that assessment of the probabilities with his new ally. A clever girl, but her ego left her with a few blind spots. But in his heart, he had been looking forward to _rescuing_ the dark-haired beauty after she fell flat on her face once again in the attempt to prove she was totally "better" than her kid sister. Some variation of that plan might still be feasible!


End file.
